Economic help for Mongolian Private Sector

Good news from the Asian Development Bank:

ADB will support the Mongolian Government in promoting higher private sector-led growth and inclusive social development, in a new Country Strategy and Program (CSP) for 2006-2008.

The CSP proposes assistance from ADB's concessional Asian Development Fund totaling about $85 million over the three years, averaging about $28 million a year. This will be supplemented by an additional $40 million from ADB's regional fund and cofinancing sources. The lending program will be supported by technical assistance grants averaging about $1.9 million a year.

The CSP aims to help Mongolia maintain stable broad-based economic growth and address priority goals of reducing disparities in development between urban and rural areas, while improving access to jobs, incomes, and higher quality public services.

Planned for the period are projects to address urban development, public administration reform, agriculture, transport, and health.

Of course, the intractible problem here is the amazingly primitive state of Mongolia's population. And I mean that in a proudly positive way. As I've noted before, Mongolia's singular for its success (largely accidental) at presrving its historical way of life, which consists mainly of herding on wide open, non-private (and non-government) land. One of the problems has been people migrating to the cities to seek work as the economy isn't strong--or developed--or even really existing at all--in the countryside. After all, there are not all that many Mongolian towns in the sense that a westerner might understand the term. Herders live a fairly independent and transient life, so it's hard, even impossible, for shops and garages and barbershops and manufacturers to pop up and have much logevity. If you can't make money (or even survive) herding, there's very little option than to move to a city (esp. Ulaan Baator). But there are so few jobs in the cities, that people fleeing to the city for work (1) doesn't help them and (2) doesn't help UB and even (3) doesn't help the Mongolia economy all that much. There are many factors for this. And people have been working on solving the problem.

With the ADB doing what they're doing, it looks like help is slowly and surely on the way. But agian, as I've noted (I'll add links later; sorry), the change that it seems must happen will happen with a heavy cost: the ending of traditional Mongolian life. Indeed, permanence and a departure from the age old nomadic way of life may be the only way for Mongolia to ever take economic flight. More on this later.