Mongolia-Participation in Comecon

Entey into Comecon was a great boon to Mongolia's economic development, enabling it to secure increased amounts of foreign investment, assistance, and technical cooperation; to expand foreign trade markets; to raise product quality to international standards; and to coordinate economic planning better in order to direct the specialization and development the of the economy under "socialist economic integration." Mongolia coordinated its five-year plans with Comecon's five-year multilateral cooperation plans as a participant in Comecon's Cooperation in the Sphere of Planning Activity Committee as well as its Science and Technology Cooperation Committee. These committees also drew up multilateral long-term, special cooperation programs in the areas of transportation, food, energy, and consumer goods, which included development projects in Mongolia, such as the thermal electric power plant in Baga Nuur. Mongolia also participated in Comecon commissions for agriculture, coal industry, electric power, food industry, geology, light industry, nonferrous metallurgy, and transportation, and it cooperated in Comecon efforts in construction, currency-finance, foreign trade, health care, standardization, statistics, telecommunications, and postal communications.

Mongolia also received assistance from Comecon on a multilateral basis. Comecon financed the activities of the Comecon International Geological Expedition and the construction of a number of scientific, communications, and cultural facilities in Mongolia. As a member of Comecon's International Bank for Economic Cooperation and the International Investment Bank, Mongolia was eligible for, and took advantage of, loans at preferential rates. Mongolia also benefited from "incentive prices" for basic imported commodities; such commodities as fuel were imported at lower prices than those charged to Comecon's more developed East European countries (see Foreign Assistance, Investment, and Joint Ventures , this ch.).

Data as of June 1989