New Research: How does Local Mining Impact on Rural Immigration: Case of Mongolia

A short paper by Amartuvshin Amarjargal (University of the Humanities, Ulaanbaatar) , Yaoqi Zhang School of Forestry & Wildlife Sciences, Auburn University, Jiquan Chen (Michigan State University) write on

How does Local Mining Impact on Rural Immigration: Case of Mongolia

Abstract

After 70 years of communist regime, Mongolia chose a radical transition for democracy and a market economy in 1990. Since the 2000s, the Mongolian government has been promoting the mining industry to increase its foreign exchanges. The mining sector may offer local job opportunities and revenues, but might also cause loss and degradation of pasture land the local people depend on. An empirical study is conducted to investigate whether the immigration of rural people from a mining area is different from that of a non mining area using a probit model based on a 2013 workforce survey of Mongolia. The result shows that mining soums receive fewer outsiders than the non-mining soums, suggesting local mining activities exert limited economic linkage in local community for a case of Mongolia.

See paper here [colostate.edu].

What is also suggested in the paper, but doesn't come out strongly in the statistics is that mining may cause an outward push from local communities away from mining because of harmful effects of mining development on their traditional sources of income of cattle. Mining is accompanied with the buildup of dust, and pollution of water resources that force nomadic communities to move away. Consequently, since these negative effects are born by a some communities more than others, they add to the unequal distribution of the rents. At least, this is what anecdotal evidence suggest [futurechallenges.org] according to the first author. Better data, particularly with a time-dimension, would be required to show these things in a statistical way.