In Asia: Weekly Insight and Features from Asia

Last week – February 15 – marked the deadline for Mongolia’s highest-level officials and civil servants to reveal all: all of their financial and material worth, that is. Civil servants and officials were required to submit Asset and Income Disclosure (AID) statements by that deadline, with disclosures from the top 270 officials posted on a [...]

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With four-fifths of its export income dependent on mining exports, Mongolia was hit particularly hard by the recent international economic crisis. A recent New York Times article goes so far as to say that Mongolia is arguably Asia’s hardest hit country. For a nation experiencing a period of rapid growth averaging 9 percent per year [...]

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Over the last two decades, Asia has been the fastest growing region in the world, explains Bruce Tolentino, Asia Foundation’s Director of Economic Reform and Development Programs. Yet even in these fast-growing countries, poverty and inequality has persisted. In a new video, Tolentino explains some of the key impediments to broad-based economic growth and how [...]

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With the signing of a landmark investment agreement in October, Mongolia is about to undergo a mining boom. The country has several world-class mineral deposits that remain undeveloped today. As the Mongolian government prepares to sign more deals to begin developing these deposits, protecting the country’s environment and water resources is critically important. Climate change [...]

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Today, International Anti-Corruption Day, The Asia Foundation released its eighth semi-annual Corruption Benchmarking Survey (CBS) in Mongolia. The only surveying tool in Mongolia that gauges corruption on the household level, the survey was conducted in partnership with the Sant Maral Foundation using multi-level randomization and face-to-face interviews. Findings from the survey indicate that Mongolian households [...]

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Last week, USAID, Radiohead, and MTV EXIT announced that their music video collaboration had received the prestigious 2009 Asia-Pacific Child Rights Award. The USAID-MTV EXIT (End EXploitation and Trafficking) campaign in partnership with influential UK-rock band Radiohead produced the innovative music video for their song “All I Need” off the album In Rainbows. All MTV [...]

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From afar, Mongolia and Laos may not have a lot in common. From an environmental point of view, however, both nations share the same concern: water is a precious resource that needs to be protected. I learned first-hand of that shared concern when I traveled to Mongolia in September. I was there to learn from [...]

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Human trafficking is one of the most egregious human rights abuses. Each year, millions of men, women, and children are trafficked within their own countries or abroad into exploitative, abusive, and often illegal labor sectors. Many trafficking victims are forced into sexual slavery, domestic servitude, or hard labor and suffer from both physical and psychological [...]

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Pre-election polling indicated it would be a tight race between Mongolia’s two presidential candidates: the incumbent President N. Enkhbayar, representing the former Communists’ Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party (MPRP), and the opposition candidate, Ts. Elbegdorj, representing the Democratic Party.  There was also speculation on how free and fair the elections would be: The Asia Foundation’s Voter [...]

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The story of Bat-Erdene, who lives in remote eastern Mongolia, chronicles the impact that the Books for Asia program has made here. Growing up in the late 1990’s, Bat-Erdene was thirsty for knowledge and information about the world around him. The books that were distributed through The Asia Foundation’s Books for Asia program were among [...]

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