Economic challenges rise amid soaring external debt www.zgm.mn

In terms of debt burden, Mongolia ranked 59th out of 66 developing countries, with the economy shrinking by 10.7 percent in the first quarter of 2020. The total foreign debt reached USD 30.6 billion at the end of 2019, increased by USD 1.9 billion in the last four years. The country’s external debt per capita had also increased from MNT 15 million to MNT 28.3 million. Total revenue in the trade sector contracted by 5.4 percent, with businesses losing more than MNT 280 billion since the pandemic. Thousands of people who used to work in the sector are now unemployed without income. Moreover, revenue from the catering sector decreased by MNT 2.8 billion in the first quarter. In terms of different industries, most of the travel companies saw a deficit, with hotel revenues down 42.9 percent, or nearly double their operations. The external debt has risen sharply by 35 percent over the past five years, and Mongolia is scheduled to repay USD 2.9 billion in foreign debt next year. This is about 70 percent of the country’s official foreign exchange reserves which stands at USD 4.09 billion. As of May, the Bank of Mongolia (BoM) has purchased 8.5 tons of precious metals. Specifically, gold accounts for 6.8 tons of and silver 1.7 tons. The gold purchase has doubled from the previous year, and the central bank and the government are estimating to increase it to 23 tons this year.

Prices of Mongolia’s main export products surge www.news.mn

As a developing nation, rich in natural resources, Mongolia’s economy is dependent on its southern neighbour, China, which buys practically all its copper and iron ore and coking coal. With the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, Mongolia had to take the tough decision to close its borders to the outside world – as a result, exports were completely halted. Although people still cannot travel, natural resource exports can and the signs are good.

Unlocking Mongolia’s Rich Renewable Energy Potential www.montsame.mn

Zuunbayan-Tavantolgoi railroad construction in full swing www.montsame.mn

Launched in May 2019, the construction project for 414.6-km railway connecting Zuunbayan with Tavantolgoi is in full swing. Earthworks of the railway construction are ongoing with 82 percent completion, pipeline construction with 67 percent and other types of civil works, including dams are completed 84 percent.

Donald Trump Jr.’s Mongolia Hunting Trip Cost Taxpayers $77,000 www.huffpost.com

Donald Trump Jr.’s trip last summer to Mongolia to kill an endangered sheep cost American taxpayers nearly $77,000 in Secret Service costs alone, watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington reported Monday.

Mongolia reports no new COVID-19 cases, 10 more recoveries www.xinhuanet.com

June 9 (Xinhua) -- Mongolia reported no new cases of COVID-19 in the last 24 hours, with the national tally remaining at 194, the National Center for Communicable Diseases (NCCD) said Tuesday.

‘S**thole’ Countries Have Handled The Coronavirus Better Than The United States www.huffpost.com

‘S**thole’ Countries Have Handled The Coronavirus Better Than The United States

huffpost.com 2020 06 09

The coronavirus didn’t hit wealthy countries first, but it hit them hard. So far, nearly four out of five global COVID-19 deaths have occurred in the global north, which encompasses most developed nations.

The United States, Italy, Spain, France and the United Kingdom contain just 7.5% of the world’s population — and two-thirds of its coronavirus death toll.

While the failures of the developed world to contain the virus have been well-documented, the successes of the global south — comprising newly industrialized or developing countries — have gone mostly unnoticed.

Last month, the World Bank reported that developing countries make up 85% of the global population but account for just 21% of COVID-19 deaths. In late May, the entire region of West Africa — which has a greater population than the United States — had recorded just 654 COVID-19 deaths, a figure some Western countries were racking up every day.

This phenomenon is no coincidence. The global south features countries with a vast range of demographic, climatic and geographic features. Many coronavirus superstars, including Vietnam, Mongolia and Slovenia, share borders with pandemic hotspots. And while it’s true that poor countries have lower testing rates — and some may be fabricating their statistics entirely — conditions on the ground give little indication that the developing world has experienced the coronavirus pandemic as severely as its wealthier counterpart.

So what explains the strikingly lower death tolls in what President Donald Trump once called “shithole countries”? The most convincing explanation, experts said, is that poor countries have simply managed the pandemic better than rich ones.

“Whenever we see success in the developing world, we tend to tell the story in terms of things that are outside their control,” said Charles Kenny, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and the author of ”Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding and How We Can Improve the World Even More.” Over the last few decades, he said, the global south has made huge strides in terms of infrastructure, literacy, health care and welfare policy. Those achievements laid the groundwork for poor countries’ coronavirus response — but have gone almost entirely unnoticed in the developed world.

“We have a problem talking about the policy successes of developing countries, which are considerable,” Kenny said. Western media sources tend to emphasize developing countries’ challenges rather than their achievements. Even when they do get credit for lifting their populations out of poverty, stories in the international press often emphasize the role of Western charities rather than domestic efforts.

Mongolia took a series of deliberate steps to stop the spread of coronavirus, including disinfecting public spaces in the capital, Ulaanbaatar. The country has reported zero coronavirus deaths.
But the available evidence suggests that developing countries have tackled COVID-19 not through luck or chance, but rather through the diligent efforts of their politicians and their populations.

In January, while Trump was assuring Americans that the few known cases would soon fall to zero, Senegal was closing its borders, initiating contact tracing and committing to provide a hospital bed to every COVID-19 patient. In February, as Western European leaders allowed the virus to spread at mass gatherings, Mongolia canceled its national lunar new year celebrations and set up a task force with more than 800 staff members.

And in March, as the United States distributed meager social benefits and bailed out corporations, the Cook Islands, a small country with incomes roughly on par with Sri Lanka, devised a welfare package worth 11% of its gross domestic product that included cash payments to older adults and a three-month waiver of electricity bills for every household.

These cases are not outliers. Many poor countries with small coronavirus outbreaks took deliberate, early and decisive steps while those in the West wasted precious time dithering. And they took these steps against considerable odds.

Senegal, like many sub-Saharan African countries, has a mostly informal economy, making quarantines both logistically difficult and economically devastating. The entire country had just 86 intensive care unit beds at the start of the pandemic. Nevertheless, within weeks of the global outbreak, local officials had established 78 field offices, dispatched contact tracing teams and allocated a $160 million response budget.

As of Saturday, Senegal had just 47 deaths. Pennsylvania, a state with roughly the same population, had 5,931.

The story of the developing world in recent decades has been falling rates of violence and government services reaching more people. That story has been overlooked because no one wants to tell it.
Charles Kenny, author of “Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding and How We Can Improve the World Even More”
“We’ve managed to set politics aside and put solidarity and togetherness first,” said Aminatou Sar, the Senegal program director for PATH, an international public health nonprofit. The country has spent the years since the 2014 Ebola outbreak deliberately strengthening its health care infrastructure and establishing data gathering and surveillance systems. Senegal didn’t get lucky; it did the work many of its wealthier counterparts refused to.

There are, of course, failures as well as successes in the developing world. Brazil now has one of the world’s worst outbreaks. Some developing country heads of state have touted unproven medications, while others have used the pandemic as an excuse for power grabs and police harassment. With death tolls rising in Egypt, Peru and Bangladesh, many experts fear the virus surging in regions it had previously spared.

But while it’s important to acknowledge those caveats, it’s also worth noting that experts have been predicting calamity in the developing world for months. So far, it hasn’t happened. And when it comes to power grabs and unfounded medical advice, rich countries have made the same missteps as poor ones — hydroxychloroquine, anyone? — and have managed to rack up a death toll that outpaces the developing world by an order of magnitude.

Poor Countries Intervened Early
Perhaps the most decisive step developing countries took to control the coronavirus was intervening before it was too late. Across the global south, countries closed their borders and locked down their populations far sooner than Western countries.

Trinidad and Tobago, for example, shut down its economy the day after recording its first case. Rwanda halted all commercial flights five days after detecting the virus. The Cook Islands, a country whose economy is almost entirely dependent on tourism, canceled all incoming flights before recording a single case of COVID-19.

Albania, a Balkan country with so little hospital capacity that a member of parliament set up a GoFundMe to buy ventilators, has deep economic ties to Italy, one of the countries hardest hit by the virus. On March 8, the same day it confirmed the first case of COVID-19, the country canceled all travel to Italy. Two days later, it imposed one of Europe’s strictest quarantines, imposing large fines and even jail time for citizens who left their homes. The government shut down public transit, banned gatherings of more than two people and forced residents to apply for permission to use their own cars.

By early June, the country had recorded just 33 deaths, a fatality rate roughly one-tenth as severe as Germany’s and one-thirtieth as severe as that of the United States.

But the best illustration of how important early intervention was to halting the spread of the pandemic comes not from comparing poor countries to rich ones but from comparing them to each other.

Armenia and Georgia are neighboring countries in the Caucasus region with similar climates, links to the outside world and per capita GDP.

When it comes to the coronavirus, however, they have much less in common. As early as January, Georgia had halted flights from Italy and implemented temperature screening at airports. TV channels gave doctors airtime to describe the course of the virus and give sanitation advice. The government implemented a strict lockdown order on March 6.

Armenia, by contrast, never imposed a strict quarantine and waited to announce a lockdown order until March 15. By early June, Georgia had 800 cases of coronavirus. Armenia had more than 10,000.

Social Trust Eases Social Distancing
While Western reporting has typically focused on the disadvantages poor countries face when responding to the coronavirus, they also have considerable advantages.

“We have our people,” said Sar, the Senegal program director. While the global north has shifted many of its health resources to non-infectious diseases such as cancer and heart disease, developing countries have retained their focus on infectious diseases, including malaria and HIV.

Partly due to its experience with Ebola, Senegal has a sophisticated network of civil society groups and faith-based organizations with extensive experience disseminating health information. Since the start of the pandemic, nongovernmental organizations have produced radio spots in local languages; community leaders have checked in on local residents, and musical artists have recorded songs about hygiene practices.

“We’ve seen community health workers and women’s groups going into communities and telling them about the reality of the pandemic,” Sar said. “It was amazing how quickly you saw people wearing masks. This solidarity and resilience is one of the reasons why the disaster people were predicting hasn’t happened.”

This community health infrastructure, said Brigitte Seim, a University of North Carolina professor who conducts research in Malawi and Zambia, rests on another advantage enjoyed by many developing countries: Higher levels of social trust.

“We often talk about ‘government resources’ without thinking about the broader range of resources that each country has,” Seim said. Countries with less capacity for top-down government efforts often have strong networks for horizontal information-sharing and advice. This can be decisive when handling a virus that requires large numbers of people to wear masks, wash their hands and stay home from work.

“People who trust each other are going to be more willing to amplify the government’s efforts to contain an infectious disease,” she said. “That’s an incredibly powerful resource.”

Vietnam set up makeshift testing sites early in the coronavirus pandemic. Despite having far fewer resources than the United States and sharing a border with China, the country has not recorded any COVID-19 deaths.
Governments That Do More With Less
The developing world’s success at containing COVID-19 doesn’t just come from its community organizations. It also comes from its governments.

The best example of this is Vietnam. Rather than try to reinvent the wheel, Vietnam simply executed tested advice from local and international experts: Quarantine people at risk; trace positive patients; advise citizens to wash their hands, and wear masks in public.

Once the pandemic started, the government sent daily text messages to all citizens. Residents used “rice ATMs” to pick up food without violating social distancing rules. The government closed hospitals and quarantined villages when new cases appeared. These might not be the most exciting strategies, but they’re the result of years of deliberate investment.

“We applied an approach that we know works,” said Nhu Nguyen, PATH’s global health securities lead in Vietnam. “Vietnam experienced SARS and the avian influenza epidemic. The public health system has been investing in preparedness for the past 10 years.”

So far, it has paid off. The Vietnamese population experienced considerably less disruption than residents of wealthier countries. Nguyen said that in Hanoi, people were only under strict quarantine for three weeks. As of last week, restaurants had reopened (with temperature checks and a steady supply of hand sanitizer), and offices had invited back their workers.

“We’re already living in the new normal,” Nguyen said.

Many other developing country success stories reflect the same dedication to evidence-based policies and local innovation.

South Africa dispatched more than 28,000 health care workers to check symptoms and spread information door to door. Albania launched an entire TV channel dedicated to educating the public about the virus. Ghana elevated its testing rate by combining samples from multiple patients and following up with individual tests only if the batch came back positive.

All of these innovations reflect the steady improvement in living standards and infrastructure that characterizes recent history in the developing world. Over the last 20 years, many poor countries have built comprehensive welfare systems. Many middle-income countries also have universal health care, a structure that has proven to be more capable of allocating resources and tracking patients than America’s fragmented, quasi-privatized system. These governance systems may not capture the world’s attention but they were decisive in tackling COVID-19.

“One of the best-kept secrets about developing country governments is that they do a far better job of providing public services than Western governments did when they were at the same income level,” Kenny said.

Kenny warned, however, that the pandemic is not over. The dire predictions of major outbreaks in the countries least equipped to manage them haven’t come to pass yet, but they could. For all their innovation, poor countries may only have bought themselves time.

But for a disease that spreads exponentially and for which treatments are only now being developed, extra time means extra lives. Even if they have only delayed the spread of the virus, developing countries have achieved more than their global north counterparts — and with far fewer resources.

“The story of the developing world in recent decades has been falling rates of violence and government services reaching more people,” Kenny said. “That story has been overlooked because no one wants to tell it.”

By Michael Hobbes

Mongolia reports one more COVID-19 case, chartered flights ready to bring home nationals www.xinhuanet.com

June 8 (Xinhua) -- Mongolia's National Center for Communicable Disease (NCCD) confirmed on Monday one more COVID-19 case, bringing the total infections in the country to 194.

Samsung: Court rejects Lee Jae-yong arrest warrant request www.bbc.com

A court in Seoul has denied an arrest warrant request for Samsung heir Lee Jae-yong, after prosecutors accused him of accounting fraud and stock manipulation.

The ruling provides at least temporary relief for the de facto head of the South Korean conglomerate.

But Mr Lee isn't completely in the clear yet as prosecutors said they will continue with their investigation.

They can still return with new evidence and seek another arrest warrant.

Last week state prosecutors asked the court to issue an arrest warrant against Mr Lee related to their probe into accounting fraud and the controversial merger of two Samsung businesses, Samsung C&T and Cheil Industries, in 2015.

Prosecutors said the deal helped his plan to take greater control of the group.

On Friday Samsung denied the allegation of stock-manipulation against Mr Lee, saying it was "beyond common sense" to claim he was involved in the decision-making.

In another statement over the weekend, the group said the lengthy probe is weighing on management, which is in "crisis" at a time when the coronavirus pandemic and US-China trade war are adding to uncertainty.

Three top executives, including a vice president, have already been given prison sentences for hiding or destroying evidence in the probe.

Who is Lee Jae-yong?
The 51-year-old, also known as Jay Y Lee, is the son of Lee Kun-hee, chairman of Samsung Group, South Korea's largest conglomerate. He is also the grandson of Samsung founder Lee Byung-chul.

With a degree from South Korea's top university and an MBA from one of Japan's most prestigious universities, he has been groomed to take over the family firm.

He became a Samsung president in 2009 and in 2013 was made vice-chairman of Samsung Electronics, the division which makes devices including smartphones, televisions, cameras and hard drives.

Since Mr Lee's father suffered a heart attack in 2014, he has been considered the de facto boss of the entire Samsung group of businesses.

According to Forbes magazine, the divorced father-of-two has a net worth of around $6.6bn (£5.2bn).

What is the case about?
In February 2017, Lee Jae-yong was arrested and then charged over his alleged role in a political and corporate scandal linked to South Korea's then president, Park Geun-hye.

Charges against Mr Lee included bribery, embezzlement, hiding assets overseas and perjury.

Samsung was accused of paying 43bn won ($35.7m; £28.1m) to two non-profit foundations operated by Choi Soon-sil, a friend of Ms Park, in exchange for political support.

More specifically, the favours were alleged to include backing for a controversial Samsung merger which paved the way for Mr Lee to become the head of the conglomerate, a deal that needed support from South Korea's government-run national pension fund.

Mr Lee denied the charges. He admitted making donations but said Samsung did not want anything in return.

In August 2017 a court convicted him of the charges and sent him to prison for five years.

Six months later that sentence was halved, and the Seoul High Court decided to suspend the jail term, meaning he was free to go.

Batch of Belarusian firefighting vehicles shipped to Mongolia www.eng.belta.by

MINSK, 8 June (BelTA) – The Belarusian automobile engineering company MAZ and the Borisov-based firefighting equipment manufacturer Pozhsnab have shipped the first batch of firefighting, rescue, and emergency response vehicles to the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) of Mongolia, the MAZ press service told BelTA.