Purpose: Agriculture, since time immemorial, has been a major sector in reducing poverty, accelerating economic activities and source of sustainability of a nation. As most of the youth in the 21st century are targeting the youth's career in the non-agricultural sector, attracting and involving the youths in agribusinesses is the need of the hour. In this regard, the research tries to understand the awareness and involvement of youth farmers in agripreneurship in Western Nepal.Design/methodology/approach: Using a structured questionnaire, data were collected from both primary and secondary sources. On the basis of descriptive and inferential analysis, the ordered logit model is employed in the study. The research is based on explanatory research design through identifying farmers' awareness of agriculture entrepreneurship from 324 farmers of Bedkot Municipality, Kanchanpur, Nepal.Findings: Study findings have shown that agricultural knowledge with overall awareness is statistically significant. Ordered logistic regression indicated that sex has somehow influenced technical and entrepreneur skills while agriculture information highly influenced education and training. The result shows that agricultural training is still the requirement of one-fourth of the farmers, whereas another quarter of farmers need subsidies.Research limitations/implications: The study suggests that in order to enhance awareness, training, subsidy, market management and development program are widely needed. In the backdrop of declining agro-products and food security challenges, the study targets to offer an understanding to policymakers and stakeholders on addressing the dire need of agripreneurship among the youths around the world.Originality/value: The study summarizes the state of knowledge of agripreneurship of Nepalese farmers, identifies emerging issues and policy implications and priorities for future applied research.

Background: Hopefully, if rest of things work as expected, the adequate supply of electricity, as one of the major industrial energy inputs, plays vital role in determining the industrial production, at large. In this paper, the present researchers assumed that the present state of scarcity of electricity may reveal their higher level of willingness to pay for higher energy efficient ratio as a pay-off of their improved industrial productivity. It is a proven fact that as one of the dominant indicators of national economic development and prosperity, effective electricity management procedures for industry increases significantly the productivity and operational efficiency. Objectives: The present paper attempts to explore the willingness of industrialists to pay more for adequate electricity supply for the industrial purpose in the present context of Nepal. Methods: Extensive desk review was carried out with a directed intension to develop insights on effective management of energy supply-related activities in industrial sector by analyzing the advances and trends as well as synergies in different intervention areas. Findings: A large number of academic and professional research works are carried out by different researchers on electricity management, with focus on identification of energy management models, corresponding to the industrial sector that shows individual attributes, social contexts, as well as participation and knowledge, which can have cumulative effect on WTP.WTP for adequate electricity is one of the key measures for sustainable economic growth for reliable and sensible management of forecasted energy demand. Conclusions: In spite of plethora of literature on electricity management and WTP, the solutions presented by different researchers are limited in scope. Still many researchers are working on tool contributions, but most of them are only providing solutions for specific regions and communities. There is a need to develop a generic electricity management system with tracing the industrialists’ willingness to pay for adequate electricity supply in a customized manner as a generic solution. The present researcher is hopeful that this work accomplishes this need. Implications: Required strict policy regulations at governing level and effective programming at implementation at industry level.

Background: Quality health services, education and training, play a pivotal role in expanding the productivity and income of the people. The government's expenditure on education, health and social sector is increasing rapidly in developing countries like Nepal. The increasing public spending has helped achieve the MDGs targets and is helping to meet the SDGs targets. Objectives: This study is engrossed in measuring the impact of the government’s expenditure on education, health and social sector on the economic growth of Nepal. Methods: The fundamental Cobb-Douglas production function is applied to measure the economic growth of the Nepalese economy. The unit root and stationarity of variables are checked through ADF, PP and KPSS. The time series econometric model of ARDL is used to explore the short-run and long-run relationship of the variables. The validity of the ARDL model is also examined to verify the authenticity of the econometric outcome. Results: The study has anticipated that the government's education expenditure is inversely related to real GDP. In contrast, the health expenditure has shown a negative impact in the same year but a positive one in the lagged year. Similarly, the government's social expenditure and gross capital formation have a negative effect on the same year, whereas they exhibited a significant positive impact in the lagged year. Further, In the long run, the government's education and health expenditures negatively impact (-0.7233 and -0.0055), respectively in, growth. Similarly, the government's social sector expenditure (0.20189) and gross capital formation (0.14610) positively impact Nepal's economic growth. Conclusion: The econometric results of this study explain that the government's expenditure on the education and health sector has a negative impact on economic growth, and the social sector and gross capital formation have a positive impact on the economic development of Nepal. The investment in such sectors by the public sector of the private sector is significant to increase the labour force's productivity and enhance the livelihood of the poor people. Further, it reveals that the human capital investment is a continuous process and takes a generation or more to expose the outcome in the real sense.

Like the world over, Nepal was also hard hit by the second wave of COVID-19. We audited the clinical care provided to COVID-19 patients admitted from April to June 2021 in a tertiary care hospital of Nepal. This was a cohort study using routinely collected hospital data. There were 620 patients, and most (458, 74%) had severe illness. The majority (600, 97%) of the patients were eligible for admission as per national guidelines. Laboratory tests helping to predict the outcome of COVID-19, such as D-dimer and C-reactive protein, were missing in about 25% of patients. Nearly all (>95%) patients with severe disease received corticosteroids, anticoagulants and oxygen. The use of remdesivir was low (22%). About 70% of the patients received antibiotics. Hospital exit outcomes of most (>95%) patients with mild and moderate illness were favorable (alive and discharged). Among patients with severe illness, about 25% died and 4% were critically ill, needing further referral. This is the first study from Nepal to audit and document COVID-19 clinical care provision in a tertiary care hospital, thus filling the evidence gap in this area from resource-limited settings. Adherence to admission guidelines was excellent. Laboratory testing, access to essential drugs and data management needs to be improved.