Deprived Sector Lending and Non-Performing Loans in Nepal

Abstract

This study investigates the empirical impact of deprived sector lending on the nonperforming loans of commercial banks in Nepal using secondary data collected from 27 commercial banks from the fiscal year 2009 to 2018 with 262 observations. The study employed the OLS regression method for the robustness test of the result. The study establishes empirical relation between deprived sector lending and nonperforming loan of banks which was the major motivation of this study. The basic regression result shows that beta coefficient of DSL is negative which indicates higher the ratio of deprived sector lending, the lower would be the NPL and vice-versa. Similarly, this study also examines the DSL movement's impact on NPL. The result shows that the beta coefficient of ∆DSL is significantly negative with ∆NPL. This indicates that the higher the growth of DSL, the lower would be NPL growth and vice-versa. This shows that the influence of DSL is very low as per this empirical result. Overall, the study shows there is an inverse relationship between deprived sector lending and nonperforming loan of banks. The result indicates that the remark of commercial bank’s on the deprived sector lending policy of NRB is not true. The operational cost might increase with direct lending to deprive sector and that leads to decrease in the bank’s overall profit but not increases their NPL.