An economist’s take on Nepal’s ‘GenZ revolution’.
From an economist’s vantage point, politics and markets are inseparable. When the cost of a core input—especially information—falls, incentives flip, behavior updates, and power gets repriced. Those shocks don’t stay in the economy; they spill into politics almost at once.
That is Nepal’s story now. Information has become cheap—finding it, verifying it, coordinating around it. In EMH terms, public news is impounded into expectations faster, so secrecy gets expensive and patronage equilibria turn brittle. What looks like chaos is the market doing its work: rapid revelation, shorter rents, and a politics forced to compete in the open.
How we got here (in brief)
Under the Ranas, information was rationed as a tool of rule. The 1990s widened press freedoms, and the Right to Information Act (2007) made disclosure a duty. The digital era is not a rupture; it’s an acceleration. Camera phones, mobile data, and social platforms have pushed verification costs down and coordination costs toward zero. In a country where gossip once travelled by bus, rumors now arrive as video evidence.
An economist’s lens: semi-efficiency in politics
I read the present through the Efficient Market Hypothesis—not because politics is perfect, but because it reacts to news faster when information is cheap. In finance, the semi-strong form says public information is absorbed quickly into prices. Translate that to politics: leaks, court filings, audits, and viral posts get priced into expectations with speed. Coalitions reprice risk, donors hedge, cadres switch, and narratives pivot within days, not months. This is not moral progress; it’s semi-efficient adaptation. Rents that once hid behind slow information now decay sooner. To preserve them, incumbents must spend more on narrative management and loyalty maintenance. Volatility is the fee we pay for faster revelation.
The three channels doing the work
1) Coordination
Digital groups make collective action cheap. Street turnout, fundraising, even boycott threats can be organized at near-zero marginal cost. That raises the “wage” of political quiet and layered corruption: leaders must spend more to keep networks still—or deliver faster.
2) Accountability
Low-cost evidence—documents, videos, location data—increases the probability that wrongdoing is noticed and verified. Even imperfect proof shifts beliefs enough to trigger media pressure, party discipline, or legal interest. The expected duration of undiscovered misdeeds shrinks; so does the present value of rents.
3) Corruption-disclosure (distinct, and decisive)
- Lifestyle visibility: Vehicles, holidays, school fees, parties—consumption leaves a trail even when assets don’t.
- Network spillovers: If principals are discreet, associates aren’t. “Nepo-baby” attention turns relatives, aides, and favored contractors into entry points for mapping whole webs.
- Crowd-sourced forensics: Citizens replicate professional checks—reverse-image searches, geotagging, brand/price inference—creating low-cost leads that journalists and agencies can formalize.
- Narrative compounding: Memes lower the personal cost of speaking up. As more people talk, each new disclosure is likelier and more credible.
This channel does not end corruption; it reprices it. To keep the same rent, a corrupt actor must either (a) accept shorter duration, (b) pay more to keep people quiet, or (c) shift into subtler instruments—policy design, regulatory nudges, quiet equity stakes—rather than flashy grabs. For clean actors, the same mechanism lowers the cost of signaling integrity. Transparent filings and modest lifestyles now travel further for cheaper.
What the repricing looks like on the ground
- Faster coalition churn: New facts change internal odds; marginal partners bargain harder or exit sooner.
- Higher narrative spend: Media buying, influencer outreach, and litigation become defensive line items.
- Compressed procurement cycles: Scrutiny adds time to kickback-heavy designs—eroding the time value of rent.
- Risk-premium on discretion: Honest bureaucrats gain leverage because their signatures lower future disclosure risk.
Policy: make honesty cheap and opacity costly
- Machine-readable records: Asset declarations, beneficial owners, land and procurement data should be standardized and searchable.
- Real-time disclosure norms: Post tenders, variation orders, and contract payments quickly.
- Whistle-blower protection: Treat insiders who surface verifiable facts as liquidity providers in the market for truth.
- Audit by design: Build API hooks for audit trails in tax, customs, and local procurement.
- Civic capacity: Equip journalists, civil society, and students with OSINT skills.
Stability through credibility
Faster information is destabilizing in the short run, but the long-run trade is favorable: shorter rents, quicker course corrections, and a clearer price for power. The real risk is cynicism—endless scandal with no remedy. That’s why process matters: disclosures must yield fiscal recovery, disqualification, or restitution. Close the loop, rebuild trust.
Bottom line
Cheap information hasn’t made us kinder; it has made secrecy expensive. Read through an EMH lens, today’s churn is the price of repricing power—faster revelation, shorter rents, and a politics forced to compete in the open. Treat disclosure like infrastructure, cut verification frictions, and let semi-efficient politics do its quiet work. Stability will follow credibility—not silence.