7.7 Market-Centered Approach

The theory: development through markets — liberalisation and growth first (the Washington- consensus package: privatisation, deregulation, openness — Economics-II Unit 1's LPG); private provision of services; social business and microfinance (Yunus's Grameen — the Nobel lineage); value chains and agribusiness; PPPs (public-private partnerships); and the entrepreneurial poor thesis (de Soto's dead capital — Economics-II Unit 6.5's property argument). Nepal's cases: the post-1990 liberalisation's growth (and its inequality — ECO-I Unit 5.6's balance-sheet); microfinance's boom (the Grameel-model "D-class" institutions of ECO-II Unit 2 — and the over- indebtedness and cooperative-collapse episodes as the market model's Nepali cautionary file); remittances as the market's own development program (the labour export economy — ECO-I Unit 7.1); tourism and hydropower as market-led hopes (ECO-I Unit 5.2's potentials ledger). Theanthropological critique: commodification's edges (water, health, schooling priced beyond the poor); microfinance's mixed evidence (debt as development — the ethnographies of over- borrowing); the market's blindness to caste and gender exclusion (unequal playing fields — Sociology Unit 7.2's point re-applied); and the synthesis most now accept: markets, states andcommunities as complements, not substitutes — the calibration being Nepal's permanent development question.