This paper deals with oral contraceptors, their socio-demographic status the reasons as to why they accepted oral contraceptive, and the pattern of use. The data employed were obtained from a multi-sectoral rural project (in Sulla) undertaken by the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee. The “single decrement life table approach” has been used to assess the duration and pattern of use among the participants. Comulative continuation rates for all acceptors were found to be higher in Sulla than other observers have found elsewhere in the country. This is attributed to specific characteristics of the users as well as other programmes being carried out in the area. Classifying contraceptors by reasons for contraceptive use provides results which may be helpful to policy makers.  

Nepal embarked upon a programme of financial development, including interest rate liberalisation and reform in 1974. The aims were explicitly to increase domestic saving, investment and the efficiency of investment. This paper analyses the effects of the interest rate reform. Short-run effects have included a change in the composition of money, a substantial fall in velocity of circulation and capital inflow from India. The overall effect has been mildly expansionary. However, saving and investment have not responded. Other government policies strongly deter investment. Yet, a buoyant demand for investible funds is a prerequisite for successful interest rate reform. The necessity of simultaneous liberalisation and reform of government taxation, price, foreign trade and finance policies to raise the rate of economic growth is borne out in the case of Nepal.

This article shows how the recently refined theory and practice of shadow pricing is relevant in devising appropriate policies for meeting the recent concerns with poverty redressal and employment generation. It also demonstrates how the problems of employment and employment generation. It also demonstrates how the problems of employment and equity are related in a series of models where public policy is subject to an increasing number of political and structural constraints. It distinguishes between the long-run perspective planning problem in which the employment problem is manifested as the choice of the optimal growth rate for the economy, and short-run policy problems of dealing with various disequilibria and distortions which force the economy inside the constrained feasibility frontier, and for whose amelioration policies based on estimates of various shadow wage rates are shown to be crucial.