ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a critique of international development thinking as applied to Mongolia, and in particular to examine the way in which Western economic orthodoxy is at odds with indigenous Mongolian concepts of ‘property’ and ‘ownership’. The state socialist system was also seen as precluding the growth and development of a genuine market economy. The period of ‘transition’ saw Mongolia plunged into economic crisis. The worst contraction occurred in the early 1990s when incomes collapsed. The World Bank estimated that real wages halved between 1990 and 1992, and then declined by a further third in 1993. The real transition that Mongolia has experienced has been from a middle-income to a poor country, as if the process of development had been put into reverse. The advice that was given by the international development sector appears to have been flawed by ‘common-sense’ presuppositions that fail to take into account the specificities of Mongolian cultural and material conditions.
