Land-locked between its giant neighbors, Russia and China, Mongolia was the first Asian country to adopt communism and the first to abandon it. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, Mongolia turned to international financial agencies--including the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank--for help in compensating for the economic changes caused by disruptions in the communist world. Modern Mongolia is the best-informed and most thorough account to date of the political economy of Mongolia during the past decade. In it, Morris Rossabi explores the effects of the withdrawal of Soviet assistance, the role of international financial agencies in supporting a pure market economy, and the ways that new policies have led to greater political freedom but also to unemployment, poverty, increasingly inequitable distribution of income, and deterioration in the education, health, and well-being of Mongolian society. Rossabi demonstrates that...
