World Bank Nepal Country Economic Memorandum (2025)
The World Bank's 2025 account of Nepal's growth constraints, including power-sector expansion, trade and enterprise reliability evidence.
- Page status
- Verified core
- Updated
- 2026-04-14
- Last reviewed
- 2026-07-19
- Review due
- 2027-03-01
Summary
The World Bank's comprehensive economic assessment of Nepal with a significant energy/hydropower chapter. Provides the strongest international-institution perspective on Nepal's energy transition, trade patterns, and system constraints.
Key Data Points
- Hydropower capacity reached ~2,990 MW by end-2024
- >70% of capacity added since 2018 came from IPPs
- IPPs accounted for 64% of total installed hydropower by 2024
- >90% of hydropower is RoR or PRoR
- Trade shift: 2018 imported ~2,582 GWh / exported ~3 GWh → 2023 imported ~1,895 GWh / exported ~1,946 GWh
- Scheduled load shedding eliminated in 2018
- 76% of firms still reported regular power outages in 2022
- >13% of firms reported sales losses above 10% from power cuts
- System losses: ~12.7% in 2024
- September 2024 floods/landslides damaged 11 operational projects with >600 MW combined capacity
Relevance
Key source for the IPP-driven growth story, the trade transformation timeline, and the reliability gap (load shedding gone but outages persist). The firm-level outage data (76%) is uniquely valuable for the reliability argument in Stranded Generation. Trade shift data central to Electricity Trade Time Series.
Limitations
- Snapshot date: Published March 2025; covers data through end-2024. Does not capture 2025 capacity additions or trade shifts.
- Firm-level data: The 76% outage figure and 13% sales-loss figure are from a World Bank enterprise survey (2022) — representative but not annual-update series.
- Trade data: The 2023 import/export figures are calendar-year approximations from the report narrative, not identical to NEA fiscal-year accounting.