| Summary: | Nepal made significant progress on poverty and shared prosperity over the period 1996-2010, despite low domestic growth. With consistently high rates of vulnerability and exposure to a range of shocks, the risk of falling back into poverty has remained an enduring feature of the welfare narrative in Nepal. The past decade, from 2010 to 2020, has been characterized by a series of economic shocks that took place against a background of a prolonged political transition towards federalism in Nepal. These shocks were also correlated with declines in economic growth. The Coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis, which started in March 2020, is the latest in the series of economic shocks over the last decade which has adversely affected Nepal's economy and labor market; and it is likely to have had adverse welfare effects. However, the lack of data on welfare dynamics during this period has made it difficult to track the impacts of these shocks on households, workers and firms. This light poverty assessment is organized as follows: Section 1 describes the data challenges, and highlights the evolution of measures of non-monetary welfare, pre-COVID; section 2 provides an overview of the impacts of Coronavirus (COVID-19) in Nepal; and section 3 highlights the role of pre-existing vulnerabilities and structural issues in making the Coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis more costly to welfare in the short run, and in potentially deepening inequalities in the longer run
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