The Role of Financial Development in Economic Growth of Nepal: ARDL Approach of Cointegration with Structural Break Analysis

This paper, using the most recent index of financial development as developed in Svirydzenka (2016), examines the role of financial development in the economic growth of Nepal. This paper employs the Autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach of cointegration with the structural break in time series data for the period of 1980-2017. Nepal is a unique country with a population of about 30 million with high demographic dividend and big markets in the neighbours, the earlier entrant in the liberalization and reform in the region, endowed with lots of natural resources and beauties, and comparatively cheaper labor force in the region but it remains as one of the poor landlocked developing countries sandwiched between two emerging economies, namely China and India. The results show that financial development has a strong long-run positive relationship with economic growth. Therefore, developing the strategies for the proper financial development improving the financial institution quality and widening the financial market to improve capital formation would be a way to accelerate the economic growth in Nepal.