Abstract. Although the agriculture sector markedly contributes to the Nepalese economy, very little is known about the government’s investments in agricultural research activities and how these investments have impacted the sector. In this study, we picked a case of wheat crop as it is the third largest crop of Nepal in terms of total annual production. We took government’s annual wheat research investments of Nepal from Fiscal year 2005 to 2016 to analyze the effects of investment on wheat research based on the availability of data. We used compound growth rate, averages, trend line, and bar diagram to present the data and interpret the results. Results revealed that the share of operational budget was lower than supposed to be allocated for the development of wheat research. The pace of increment of wheat production and productivity were observed due to improved wheat investment and technologies. Result shows the negligible spillover effect from neighboring countries in wheat production. Even though the Nepal Agricultural Research Council (NARC) has fulfilled source seed target by producing a surplus, private sectors should involve proactively in coordination with NARC to meet the projected demand of wheat seed in national seed vision. The huge gap was observed between yield potential and average national productivity. To achieve greater impact of wheat research in Nepal, it is necessary to bridge the gap by awareness program, making the availability of improved seed with an improved package of practices.
Intergenerational sustainability (IS) has emerged as the most serious social problem reflecting climate change and accumulation of public debt in modern democratic societies, undermining the potential interests and concerns of future generations. However, little is known about whether or not deliberative forms of democracy with majority voting help support at maintaining IS by representing future generations’ potential interests and concerns. We institute IS dilemma game with three forms of decision-making models with majority voting and examine how they maintain IS in laboratory experiments. In the IS dilemma game, a sequence of six generations is prepared where each generation consisting of three subjects is asked to choose either maintaining IS (sustainable option) or maximizing their own generation’s payoff by irreversibly costing the subsequent generations (unsustainable option) with anonymous voting systems: (1) majority voting (MV), (2) deliberative majority voting (DMV) and (3) majority voting with deliberative accountability (MVDA). In MV and DMV, generations vote for their choices without and with deliberation, respectively. In MVDA, generations are asked to be possibly accountable for their choices to the subsequent generations during deliberation, and then vote. Our analysis shows that a decision-making model with only majority voting generally does not address IS, while DMV and MVDA treatments induce more and much more generations to choose a sustainable option than MV, respectively. Overall, the results demonstrate that deliberation and accountability along with majority voting shall be necessary in models of decision-making at resolving IS problems and representing future generations’ potential interests and concerns.
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