Jun 6, 2013

Mongolia: Yearly Cash for Citizens. Human Development Fund.

Mongolia is a citizen-ownership democracy!
It has laws that recognize citizen rights to the country's common wealth and it distributes citizen dividends annually/monthly.
Mongolia is a big country with a small population.
Population: 3.2 million (2013 estimate)
Country area: 1,564,116 sq km.
In comparison Malaysia has 10 times the population and one-fifth the country area, and
Singapore has 5.5 million population and an area of 700 sq km.

In 2009, Mongolia started the Human Development Fund that distributes cash dividend annually to its people.

Here are a few details about the Human Development Fund, from this paper: Managing Mongolia’s resource boom, by Asel Isakova, Alexander Plekhanov and Jeromin Zettelmeyer.
By law, the Human Development Fund is financed from mining dividends pertaining to the state and an (unspecified) part of royalty payments to the budget. The funds can be used for cash handouts to all citizens, as well as for payments linked to pensions, health care, education and housing. The law does not contain explicit provisions determining the size of payments from the Fund. The revenues and expenditures of the Fund are approved annually as part of the general budget process. 
In addition, Article 8 of the law contains a somewhat vague indication that every Mongolian may hold non-tradable preference shares in a state-owned legal entity, which holds strategic mining licences. The law leaves open to interpretation the exact relationship between such a holding and the Human Development Fund.
In February 2010 every citizen received a cash handout of MNT 70,000 (equivalent to about US$ 50), followed by smaller instalments totalling another MNT 50,000 in that year. Earlier public promises were made by key political parties to make total cash transfers of MNT 1.5 million per capita (US$ 1,200). In 2011 monthly cash handouts were sustained at MNT 21,000 (around US$ 15), and approximately a quarter of this amount was additionally disbursed as tuition fee support, leading to projected annual spending of around US$580 million (almost 10 per cent of 2010 GDP).
Mongolia recognizes citizen ownership dividend. It is a giant step toward a citizen ownership democracy. Legal recognition of citizen rights to the country's common wealth is a very significant step. Most countries only give lip service.

Independent Mongolian Metals & Mining Research: Law on Human Development Fund. Monglia's sovereign wealth fund to pool in all revenues from mineral resources including OT and TT has been approved: (2009)
Parliament Speaker D.Demberel said :
“ Just now Parliament approved very important law. This is not about simply distributing money to citizens. This has created legal environment that decided to have citizens receive a share from revenues gained from minerals.
It appears that although cash distribution is written into their laws, the amount is determined by politicians every year. This does not bode well for citizens, as we have seen in the case of Alberta's Heritage Fund. Politicians usually prioritize spending over citizen dividend distribution. The protection for a citizen dividend is not as strong as the Alaska Permanent Fund. 

2 comments:

  1. The problem is an administrator believing they know what is best on the ground. People, as in the early formation of the states, created schools locally to aid in education. This same action can be used by locals to ensure local development of infrastructure, such as alternative energy and agriculture.
    At this point in time there is so much practical information that locally people could develop practices that cause no harm and learn at the same time.
    Administrators, as politicians and big business, know this, and spend a lot of effort and resource to thwart this, which makes no sense. The problem is that a life style has been developed in excessive wealth and a belief within that this is correct, that letting go of that belief appears to end their life, when it only ends a limited self definition built over generations and passed on.
    Practically speaking, this increasingly centralized regime of ego, is destructive because it divides innate common sensibility in an effort to maintain it own illusion, not realizing that its idea about itself is just that, an idea that does no realize itself as a paranormal ideological image built of pictures that are not reality.
    It is a measure within that pays no respect to what allows that image, the physical world.

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  2. The administrator believes he can best manage every detail for everyone.

    ReplyDelete