Mongolia's top election issue: how to spend new riches - CSMonitor.com: "Mongolia's nearly 3 million people live atop $3 trillion worth of gold, copper, and coal. As foreign mining companies begin to extract this wealth, the resources could turn Mongolia – a former Soviet satellite state – into a new Qatar. But if the boom is badly handled, it might instead make the country into another Nigeria, plagued by corruption and poverty.
“The challenge for Mongolia’s newly elected leaders … will be to rise to the occasion and not squander the opportunity presented to bring prosperity to its citizens,” wrote former Mongolian Foreign Minister Nyamosor Tuya in a recent article for the Brookings Institution in Washington.
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The government that emerges from today’s parliamentary elections will have to decide both how much of the national wealth it is ready to offer to foreign mining companies to attract their investment and how to share mining proceeds among the populace."
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