International Absentees of Nepal

Vollständiger Abstract

Worum geht es in dieser Arbeit?

This paper base on the critical literature review on the phenomenon of international absenteeism in Nepal, where a significant percentage of the working-age population lives, works and remits in foreign countries, mostly in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, Malaysia, India and, more and more, in East Asian and Western destinations. The review is based on 85 sources published between 1990 and 2025 and has systematically incorporated empirical data of Nepal published by the National Statistics Office (NSO, 2025) in the new economics of labour migration (NELM), transnational’s, social capital theory, world-systems theory, and feminist migration theory as a theoretical framework. The NPHC 2021, the authoritative evidence base of migration studies to date at the national level, converts abstract theoretical assertions into empirically based propositions critical review. The results determine that the number of international absentees in Nepal in 2021 (2,190,592 individuals) was 7.5 percent of the total population enumerated, which was more than twice that in 2001 (3.3%). The male are pre-dominant (82.2%) over female (17.8%) in international absentees while 49.9 percent of the absentees are in the age group of 20-29. This review critically interacts with the prevailing remittance optimism thesis as well as structural arguments of dependency, governance failure and social disintegration at the household and community levels. It challenges gendered aspects of migration, the politics of the kafala system, and sub national and caste/ethnic differentiated pressures of emigration, and the discourse of emergent climate-driven mobility. The review concludes that Nepali international absenteeism is not a purely economic phenomenon, nor a transitional phase of any kind, but a structurally embedded, historically conditioned and multi-dimensionally contested social fact that requires integrated, rights-based and development-oriented policy responses.