KATHMANDU, July 17

Nepal has called on the international community to provide incentives to foreign investors to invest in least-developed countries (LDCs) and provide preferential access to world markets.

“There has to be incentives for foreign investors to go to LDCs and create durable value,” National Planning Commission Member Swarnim Wagle told the Third International Conference on Financing for Development, a key global summit hosted by the United Nations (UN) in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa from July 13 to 16.

He said landlocked LDCs like Nepal should be given preferential access to world markets by helping them build ‘supply-side competencies to ease their entry to regional and global value chains’.

“However, goals and objectives of LDCs going forward should be more aspirational and avoid the implied rhetoric of helplessness and dependence as if LDCs were a ‘perpetual club of the weak’,” he said, addressing a high-level meeting on Global Partnerships for a Transformative Agenda for LDCs on sidelines of summit.

The Third International Conference on Financing for Development, adopted Addis Ababa Action Agenda, expressing a strong political commitment to creating an enabling environment for financing an ambitious set of sustainable development goals in the spirit of global partnership and solidarity, says a statement issued on Friday by Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA).

The Agenda is a culmination of months of negotiations among member states of the UN covering seven areas of action in domestic public resources; domestic and international private business and finance; international development cooperation; international trade; debt sustainability; systemic issues; and science, technology, innovation and capacity building.

The Action Agenda is of particular significance as it precedes the UN Summit in September for the adoption of the Post-2015 Development Agenda as well as the UN Climate Change Conference in December. It, therefore, sets the stage for several global development milestones over the next 15 years.

Addressing the summit, Wagle said ‘traditional model of aid needs an overhaul’. And Nepal seeks a new kind of official development assistance that is cost effective, relevant, provides value for debt and helps fill critical gaps in knowledge, skills and finance.

He also emphasised on the need to augment the value of remittances by lowering the cost of transfers, optimising use through financial literacy campaigns, and reducing the heavy social consequences of temporary migration.

Wagle met with Indian Minister of State for Finance, Jayant Sinha, Tony Pipa, US special coordinator for Post-2015 Development Agenda, and Jeffrey Sachs, director of Earth Institute at Columbia University, on sidelines of the summit.