Twenty years ago, in 2001, Jagannath Adhikari, Ganesh Gurung and David Seddon wrote a short book together to report on the research they had undertaken towards the end of the 1990s, on foreign labour migration and what they called 'the remittance economy of Nepal'. The research was truly pioneering, in so far as it pulled together evidence from a wide variety of sources to reveal the hitherto un-recognised scale of remittances flowing back into Nepal from Nepali migrants living and working abroad. 

Over the next two decades, not only was the importance of foreign migration and the extent of the reliance of the Nepali economy on remittances widely recognised, but also it became evident that both foreign migration and the value of remittances had increased phenomenally, transforming key features of Nepali economy and society. The outbreak of the covid-19 epidemic prompted the three authors of the original book to embark on a new, updated, additional chapter to put the early work in perspective and also to consider the impact of the pandemic on the flows of labour and of remittances in 2020-2021 - 'the year of covid'.