This publication examines Mongolia’s recent economic development and outlines reforms that would help the country take advantage of its many opportunities. Mongolia is rich in natural resources and, although landlocked, is well-placed to boost trade with its two giant neighbors. The country needs to diversify its economy beyond mining, enhance economic stability, and increase employment. To maximize Mongolia’s potential the government can improve macroeconomic management, enhance the skill base, and provide hard and soft infrastructure to promote trade and efficient logistics. Governance and institutional reforms are also crucial. The government will need to continue to drive reforms so that they are well implemented and deliver the intended change.

Some resource-rich developing countries are in the process of harnessing immense mining resources towards inclusive growth and prosperity. Nevertheless, tapping into natural resources could be challenging given the large front-loaded investment, volatile capital flows and exposure to global commodity markets. Public investment is needed to remove the often-large infrastructure gap and unlock the economic potential. However, too rapid fiscal outlays could push the economy to its limit of absorptive capacity and increase macro-financial vulnerabilities. This paper utilizes a structural model-based approach to analyze macroeconomic impacts of different public investment strategies on key fiscal and non-fiscal variables such as debt, consumption, sovereign wealth fund, and real exchange rates. We apply the model to Mongolia and draw policy recommendations from the analysis. We find that fiscal policy adjustment, particularly moderating infrastructure investment and optimizing investment efficiency is needed to maintain macroeconomic and external stability, as well as to boost the long-term sustainable growth for Mongolia.

Mongolian and British economists present the first detailed analysis of the shock-therapy approach to economic transition that the remote Asian government adopted in 1990. They look at macroeconomic performance, the agriculture and industry sectors, the labor market, and the emerging financial sector from such perspectives as poverty, gender, privatization, and the environment. They find that policy makers have exacerbated the transition process by underestimating its complexity and by pursuing inappropriate, or at best overly optimistic, policy reforms. The treatment is revised and extended from a volume published in Mongolia in 1999. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

Prospects for 2014-2015: Mongolia's main economic and political challenges are all linked to ensuring steady growth through the boom and bust cycles likely to visit this resource-dependent economy. Double-digit economic growth over the past few years-2011's sizzling 17.3 % GDP growth, for instance-has been based on the investment in, and the production and export of, minerals. Mongolia is a major producer of several minerals including coal, copper, gold, zinc, and fluorspar. With extensive reserves, it has the potential to increase production considerably. For U.S. investors and firms, mining and mining-related services represent one of the most important and potentially most reliable sectors for long-term investment in Mongolia. Other promising sectors, based on Mongolia's economic development needs, include infrastructure, transportation, energy, construction, healthcare, and environmental products and services.

Mongolia began transforming its economy from the centrally-planned command economy to a market-oriented one in 1990. Conventional neo-liberal policy packages were implemented almost simultaneously in a relatively short period of time, which is known as a "shock-therapy" transition. However, this study argues that the conventional neo-liberal policy package implemented in a rapid manner would not succeed in transforming a centrally-planned economy into a market-oriented one unless a properly sequenced and firmly coordinated policies along with an accurately thought out program for economic transition are readily in place. Similar to other transitional economies, Mongolia experienced almost all forms of neo-liberal policy syndrome and transitional difficulty along with the emergence of other social problems, such as unemployment, poverty and inequality. The sluggish economic growth has been insufficient to bring the country out of the setbacks experienced in the initial years of transition. After a passage of more than a decade, the economy was still based on the primary industries, with raw and semi-processed materials from the mining and agriculture dominating the exports.