Economics, Politics and Public Policy in East Asia and the Pacific
Author: Julian Dierkes, UBC
In April 2012, Chinese miner Chalco launched a takeover bid for South Gobi Resources.
The bid prompted the Mongolian parliament to pass a new foreign investment law distinguishing between bids made by private companies and bids made by state-owned enterprises (SOE) and introducing monetary thresholds for different kinds of reviews. Read more…
Author: Amy Dowler, ANU
On the evening of 1 July 2012, three days after parliamentary elections were held, a large number of Mongolians gathered in Ulaanbaatar’s Sukhbaatar square, Mongolia’s equivalent of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, to release floating lanterns commemorating the lives lost in violence following the 2008 election.
In 2008, suspicions that the incumbent Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party, which has since changed its name to the Mongolian People’s Party (MPP), had rigged the polls triggered street protests by supporters of the opposition Democratic Party (DP). Read more…
Author: Li Narangoa, ANU
A total of 544 candidates from 11 parties and 2 coalitions contested the 76-seat parliament in Mongolia’s 2012 parliamentary election.
Preliminary results show that the Democratic Party received the highest number of votes (approximately 31–32), followed by the current ruling party, the Mongolian People’s Party (approximately 27–28), and the Justice Coalition (11). Read more…
Authors: Julian Dierkes and Brandon Miliate, UBC
The results from Mongolia’s 28 June 2012 parliamentary election on are in — sort of. The General Electoral Commission (GEC) announced the preliminary results on 30 June, with official results set to be announced by 13 July. No party won an outright majority, which would require 39 seats in the 76-member State Great Khural.
The Democratic Party (DP) won 31 seats, thus becoming the most Read more…
Authors: Julian Dierkes, UBC and Bill Rafoss, University of Saskatchewan
Politics is heating up in Mongolia as the country moves toward a parliamentary election scheduled for 28 June 2012.
In April, former president Nambaryn Enkhbayar, the current leader of the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party (MPRP), was arrested on corruption charges. Read more…
Author: Todd Landman, University of Essex
Mongolia has always been an unlikely case of democratisation.
A sparsely populated, poor country sandwiched between Russia and China, it defied all odds with a relatively peaceful democratic transition in 1990. Since then, it has had regular elections and transfers of political power between the main political parties, Read more…
Author: Brent White, University of Arizona
If you want a sense of the outcome of rule-of-law reform efforts in Mongolia over the last two decades, spend a few hours driving in Ulaanbaatar.
Your immediate impression is likely to be one of chaos. Read more…
Author: Veronica Taylor, ANU
Visual images of regulatory failure in Asia are a staple of mainstream media in the west: contaminated food killing children; humanitarian disasters magnified by ramshackle construction; industrial landscapes thick with sulphurous smoke; corrupt officials facilitating transactions from traffic fines to people smuggling.
In policy literature these acute social, economic and environmental issues are attributed to deficient national and local governance and a lack of regulatory capacity. Read more…
Author: Mendee Jargalsaikhan, UBC
The Chinese Foreign Minister’s brief visit to Mongolia on 24 February, like the Chinese Premier’s visit last June, did not trigger any negative public debate or protests in the streets of Ulaanbaatar.
Rather, an op-ed by well-known columnist Baabar on the repression and marginalization of Chinese ethnic minorities during the communist era received wide attention. Read more…
Author: Justin Li, ICE
Julian Dierkes’ thoughtful response to my essay on Chinese investment in Mongolia obliges clarification of some of my earlier points. I confess my ignorance of ‘Third Neighbour’ policy and, though one commentator suggests that it ante-dates large-scale Chinese investment in Mongolia and therefore cannot really be perceived as responding to that, it certainly helps to contextualise aspects of Mongolian foreign investment and trade policy.
It is important to take a closer look at the decision behind the controversial ‘east-west’ railway project approved by the Mongolian Parliament. Read more…
Author: Julian Dierkes, University of British Columbia
Justin Li’s 2 February 2011 post is welcome in that it attempts to analyse the economic development of Mongolia in its political context. It is also significant in that it raises an important aspect of China’s perceived rise in standing and its newly assertive foreign policy, namely that this has a very specific impact on regional (security) dynamics and popular perceptions.
Li’s essay mainly focuses on the extent to which politics and populism have got mixed up (I assume that’s how he might see it) with investment decisions. This ignores another political arena entirely: foreign policy. Read more…
Author: Justin Li, ICE
The investment and trading relationships between China and Mongolia seems like a marriage made in heaven. Landlocked and poverty-stricken, Mongolia has an abundance of coal, copper and iron ore that China craves to feed its rapid industrialisation. Mongolia’s proximity to China, its largest customer, also offers it considerable cost advantages against other major commodities suppliers such as Australia and Brazil.
The trade and investment figures between these two countries certainly bear witness to a strong and complementary relationship. China has been the largest investor in Mongolia since 1998 and its largest trading partner since 1999, and it has retained these positions ever since. Read more…
Author: Benjamin Reilly
East Asia contains three of the world’s semi-presidential democracies (as pointed out in the latest APEC Economies Newsletter here) : Taiwan, Mongolia, and East Timor. Each of these countries is an unusual case of democratisation: Taiwan is one of East Asia’s famous ‘tiger’ economies and the world’s only Sinitic democracy, but faces an ongoing crisis of nationhood; Mongolia is one of the few unambiguous cases of a successful transition to democracy and a market economy in the post-Communist world; while East Timor is both Asia’s poorest nation and its newest democracy. Prior to their democratic transitions, each was also under the influence of a large foreign power — be it Russia in relation to Mongolia, Indonesia in East Timor, or China’s claim to sovereignty in relation to Taiwan. This is not a propitious starting point for a transition to democracy; indeed, in different ways, each country seemed to lack some of the essential preconditions for successful democratisation.
Nonetheless, each has succeeded to the extent that successive free elections and peaceful changes of power have now occurred.As part of their transitions to democracy, East Timor, Mongolia and Taiwan each chose semi-presidential constitutions. Semi-presidentialism is an increasingly popular constitutional model which combines a directly elected president with significant powers as well as a prime minister chosen by the legislature. France and Portugal are long-standing examples, along with many new democracies in Eastern Europe and Southern Africa. In Asia, East Timor, Mongolia and Taiwan are all clearly semi-presidential in the sense of having ‘a popularly elected, fixed-term president existing alongside a prime minister and cabinet who are responsible to parliament’.