It has been 20 years since we made a choice for democracy, aspiring towards the supreme objective of developing a humane and civil society as it was declared in the Constitution of Mongolia. The development of a country is measured by two measures: prosperity and peace.
Donald Trump, President of the U.S, has recently tweeted his Christmas wish “We do have prosperity. Now we want peace for 2018”. But for Mongolia, we have peace, but we don’t have prosperity.
In order to be prosperous and peaceful, a country must have democracy, a free market and innovation. How did these three factors change for Mongolians, as of 2017?
Democracy
According to The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, where 167 countries are scored on a scale of 0 to 10 by 60 indicators, Mongolia has been stuck in the category of “flawed democracy”, with a score of 6.62 from 2014 to 2016. Norway has been leading this list with a score of 9.93 for the past 5 years, meaning that it has “full democracy”. North Korea, on the other hand, it has been the last one on the list for the past 7 years, with a score of 1.08, in “authoritarian regime”.
Free market
According to the survey conducted by the National Statistics Committee of Mongolia and World Bank, 29.6% of the population or one third of Mongolians are in poverty. This has increased by 37% compared to the same survey of 2014. The poverty rate is the lowest in Umnugovi aimag with 15.4% and the highest in Govisumber aimag with 52%.
Mongolia has been put into the category of “low economic freedom” in The 2017 Index of Economic Freedom as established in The Heritage Foundation’s report after going down 4.6 points and becoming the 129th country out of 180, with a score of 54.8 in total. The leading country in this index was Hong Kong, with 89.8 points and the last country was North Korea, with 4.9 points.
The Global Human Capital Index of 2017 shows that Mongolia is in 51st place with a 64.35% score, out of 130 countries. This list was led by Norway with 77.12% and Yemen was the lowest with 35.48%.
Innovation
In the Global Competitiveness Index of 2017-2018, Mongolia was the 101st country out of 137 countries, creating only 0.03% of the global GDP. What we did best on in that index was “higher education and training” and what we did worst on was “business environment”, out of the 12 main factors.
As for innovation, we were listed 101st. Our score regarding competitiveness fluctuated between 3.6 and 3.9 while our neighboring countries, China and Russia, have been among the leading participants with 5 points and 4.64 points, respectively.
We have an objective to become one of the top 70 counties in competitiveness and one of the top 40 countries with the best business management.
What makes doing business harder in Mongolia is currency exchange, corruption, unstable policies and governments.
Mongolia is very peaceful at the moment, but there is no prosperity yet.
Trans. by U.Binderiya
2017.12.27