> they can charge 30-40% of orignal price to receive electronic items

Ouch. Hanlon’s razor aside, it’s almost as if the government is intentionally preventing the economy from modernizing.

Really sad that some bureaucrats couldn’t see the huge long term gains of a more technology-oriented economy, and instead could only focus on whatever marginal short term revenue these tariffs generated.

Red tape is definitely an issue, but freight costs to Nepal are also extremely high. It's a landlocked country with very poor transportation networks. Air courier (eg DHL) to Kathmandu is in the range of $5/kg, and if the final destination is in a village it needs to be hand-carried there. So accessing cheap stuff from abroad is much harder than we might think coming from developed countries. There is no such thing as slapping on a FedEx label right to the final destination.

So the freight cost to send someone a laptop is under $25? That seems reasonable if of course the person is living in Kathmandu...

The government tax on electronics is not good though. I'd have to paypal them extra money to cover it, if paypal is even a thing for them.

Could go the opposite way and welcome everyone and everything in, and have situations like your ports being bought by China, as is happening in African nations.

AFAIK, China has invested considerably in controlling African port infrastructure and operations, not trade policy in the abstract. While owning a port often implies direct control over what goes through it, the converse is not true: a government can still control its own port infrastructure while being completely laissez-faire about what goes through it.

They are building the ports to control the policy, it ain’t altruistic.

China owned port can be shut down on a whim, thus giving its owner political power because closing the port would effect the nations livelihood via exports/imports.

They do in a proxy way control the policy. Often times, it is not just port infrastructure. Also manufacturing, agriculture and mining.

This is the problem in many emerging economies in SE Asia. Just because many people are struggling to arrange their daily meals, Governments get into socialist mode and taxes anything which does not classify as bare necessity. Sadly, it is a vicious loop and these economies are not modernizing enough at a rapid pace despite so much talent waiting for an opportunity.

If the tax money is spent on education, healthcare, and infrastructure such as communication/fiber and water, then it will only take one generation to go from: poor - have to work in order to eat, to poor - but have free time to learn coding without starving, then after 3 generations you might have gone to an information society without going through the industrial age. Unless other countries suck out all the bright minds.

Or you do it like Singapore a bit faster.

I agree with everything you said but your usage of "Just Because" for daily meals doesn't feel right.

I'm weird, your comment got me interested in Nepalese custom duties. I had a read through and it looks like notebooks do not incur import duties in Nepal!

> Automatic data processing machines and units thereof; magnetic or optical readers, machines for transcribing data on to data media in coded form and machines for processing such data, not elsewhere specified or included. -Portable automatic data processing machines, weighing not more than 10 kg, consisting of at least a central processing unit, a keyboard and a display: 8471.30.10 ---Notebook and Laptop

> Import Duty (% except otherwise specified)

> SAARC: Free

> GENERAL: Free

https://customs.gov.np/storage/files/1/Custom%20Tariff/Custo...

You're welcome.

My experience with China customs is that if custom officer feels like taxing you 15%/25%/45% on this particular day, they will find a way to tax you. Unless.

What the law specifies is not always the lived reality.

In Argentina you have to pay 50% of the market value for all electronic imports and you will have to deal with customs officers (who will usually try to make your day quite miserable if you don't "tip" em)

I wasn't even able to send anything from abroad to my colleagues in Vietnam. We make electronics + firmware + backend API's and he needed a few Samsung phones + electronics to test; you can only ship new phones sealed in boxes there and electronics need bucket loads of paperwork and then pay $. Never had that issue with China, but it's 2+ years ago since I last had to ship anything there though.

Is worth mentioning regarding Argentina and this HN submission in particular that the government is aiming to provide a laptop to every secondary student, they are build (assembled is probably more accurate) in Argentina and they come with a Linux distribution maintained by them called Huayra. I think that is pretty awesome for such a poor country. Customs in general are annoying, I was arriving to Germany from the US with a new MacBook, I was stopped and they ask me where did I buy the computer, I had bought in Germany, so they say it was fine, they told me to send a copy of the invoice to them, which I did. They were just making sure I paid the taxes there. From what I heard from Argentineans bribing is very common, but they somehow think people taking the bribes are the only corrupt but not people bribing, or avoiding taxes.

Germans also have been somehow ok with paying bribes: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-siemens-executive-plea... https://www.dw.com/en/ex-siemens-manager-pleads-guilty-in-us... In the 90s, those bribes would have been tax deductible in Germany: https://archive.is/Eit0f

> From what I heard from Argentineans bribing is very common, but they somehow think people taking the bribes are corrupt but not people bribing, or avoiding taxes. Wait this isn't the case everywhere. I thought this how corruption laws are made.

If the officer feels like doing that, they will. That's sadly the case in many countries.

Was the case for me when I flew back to Germany with my music instruments. They would not listen to any reason but forced me to pay to get the instruments that are my property back. Thieves.

> Sadly, with how things are with the courier and customs dep. here they can charge 30-40% of orignal price to receive electronic items

Something I never really understood, when going to less developed countries, why are customs always trying to fleece everyone? Normalized bribes, byzantine bureaucracy, astronomical import duties on computers and essential products.

What's the goal with this? Is there some kind of long term strategy I'm not seeing? Do they not want investments or a tech sector?

The unemployment and brain drain these countries suffer sure paints a bleak picture.

During my travels I met a family in Kenya who were some of the friendliest people I'd ever met. They showed us all around the the local towns and brought us to a fantastic bunch of places. In return, I wanted to support their son who was going through education at the time - either pay his fees or send him school supplies. Unfortunately, they said that there was no point because any money or supplies we sent to them would never arrive; they'd just be taken by the people at the post office as soon as they saw a foreign stamp. It wasn't even government mandated fees on customs. It was just theft. This was before the advent of digital currency and other means of sending money abroad, so we simple had no way we could support them other than giving them gifts while we were there.

I still think about them all the time, and how sad it is that people live in a society like that where blatant robbery was simply the norm. It gives me some hope though that with the proliferation of affordable mobile phones across impoverished regions, people finally have the means, however modest, to receive an education.

I remember a story a few years ago about a boy in some remote area in Mongolia who could follow remote courses from MIT and improve his chances at getting a job.

I think that cheap computers and internet changed the game in education. I can learn to code in python anywhere. When I was studying, PC were few and you had to be at a university to have a reasonable chance to touch one. There was practically no internet.

> Do they not want investments or a tech sector?

The individual customs official or even the department is not incentivized to look at the benefit to the entire country. On the other hand, they are directly responsible to increase their collections, based on which they get a cut.

I don’t know about Nepal, but traditionally places like Brazil pursued “import substitution” strategies of charging high tariffs on technology products to try to establish home-grown industries, and pursue autarky (self-sufficiency).

It’s an insane thing to do since the benefits to consumers and business users of these products is many times higher than the money made by the industries producing them. To a lesser extent the same pattern emerges in dirigiste-curious economies like Canada who limit foreign entrants into markets like telecom, resulting in a general tax on the entire population who suffer expensive and inadequate data plans in order to protect local oligopolies.

> To a lesser extent the same pattern emerges in dirigiste-curious economies like Canada who limit foreign entrants into markets like telecom, resulting in a general tax on the entire population who suffer expensive and inadequate data plans in order to protect local oligopolies.

That's something I never understood either. Telecom is a commodity. I also think that's what hurt Blackberry back when it was still relevant: They were developing these phones in an environment where the carrier had all powers and where data was so limited.

I remember them being incredibly skeptical at the iPhone because Apple was expecting data to become cheap and plentiful.

> the benefits to consumers and business users of these products is many times higher than the money made by the industries producing them

the money made by the industries producing them is tangible, and there are lobbies protecting it, whereas the benefits to customers are intangible.

If you think about it, it is not the insane thing, in fact, given the system, it is the sane rational thing that benefits these actors.

Less developed for a reason.

There are a significant amount of people who are basically milking the rest of the society with their power and doing so without any consequence. This is what entrenched corruption looks like.

There are no need to specifically break any laws that others are not breaking already, there just have to be so many that compliance is impossible and enforcement selective. When the gray area expand so significantly, you get the power broker rich as they enjoy competitive advantage.

The high fees are used to discourage imports. Here in my country they say these taxes are used to "protect the local businesses/manufacturing", but it makes absolutely no sense, because most (tech) products aren't even made here. They usually charge you 60-70% of the retail price.

Emergent, not planned. But everyone gets a cut, so nothing changes.

I'd like to help more; Could you email me at [email protected] whenever you have free time and energy?

FedEx are very good, the sender can choose to pay all the charges.

Nope.

In 2016 I tried fedex and told my friends to send old macbook. In insurance he had written the purchase price. And I had to pay all the taxes. And it was 40% tax.

Customs officers are thieves here.

And fedex did nothing. I supposed the would deliver to my home. But they made me run for 2-3 days and told me to go to customs and claim my items.