Developing Mongolia

How do you measure how much a country is developed? Luckily the United Nations does it for us, by compiling the Human Development Index, which tells us what countries are more developed and less developed by looking at three important factors: life expectancy, expected years of schooling, and standard of living, which is measured by dividing the gross national income by the population to get the average contribution to the economy per person.

The most developed country according to the HDI is Norway, with a score of .944 (1.0 is perfect). The least developed country is Niger, at .337. Mongolia's HDI is .698, which places it squarely in the middle of the pack as a medium developing country. In the table below you can see steady improvement since 1980 (the start of the HDI), with the brief exception of 1990-1995 (I wonder if the transition to democracy, even though it was peaceful, has anything to do with that decrease?). In the 30+ years since the start of the figure, Mongolia's life expectancy has increased more than 10 years, the expected years of schooling has increased more than 4 years and the GNI per person has almost doubled.

does not include 2013's numbers, source

And yet, Mongolia's improvements put it below the average for its region, particularly in standard of living (GNI).

Mongolia compared to similar countries and East Asia as a region, source

Based on all I've written about in this blog, I don't think that much of this comes as a surprise. It is a bit more of a surprise, maybe, how well Mongolia does when the HDI is adjusted for inequality, compared to other medium developing countries.  When adjusted for inequality, Mongolia's HDI falls 11.5% but the average for all medium HDI countries is 24.2% and the average fall for East Asia is 21.3% (the U.S. Inequality HDI falls more than 17%, FYI) (source).

The next chapter of the book is about food and agriculture (mmm, food, NOT), so that might be my next post, but I might also be inspired to talk about fair trade and world trade before then. It depends on how busy my week is. But either way, I will see you next time!