Mongolia: developing human resources.

Abstract

Population news from Mongolia, ESCAP'S northernmost Asian member, is not often available, so we are reproducing the following excerpt from a published article by David Finkelstein, a lawyer and Asian affairs specialist with the Ford Foundation. "This land-locked central Asian nation (formerly known as OUter Mongolia), which shares borders with the U.S.S.R. and China, stretches 1500 miles from east to west and 800 miles from north to south. Yet it has less than 1,500,000 people, for an average density of only 2 persons/sq mile. In an effort to increase population and overcome the consequent shortage of manpower, government policy encourages large families. Paradoxically, although the current annual increase is slightly over 3%, the very process of modernization which requires this development of human resources has produced in Ulan Bator (the capital), with a population of about 350,000 (or almost a quarter of the country's entire population), a growing number of educated people who want to keep their families small and manage to do so despite the apparent prohibition against any form of contraception."