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MongoliaSocial Mobility
High Rates of Mobility
The expansion of the economy and the rapid growth of the
urban, industrial, and service sectors made high rates of social
mobility possible in the 1970s and the 1980s. Population growth,
which accelerated in the late 1950s and peaked around 1970, was
barely able to keep up with the expansion of positions in new
factories, schools, and local government bodies. In the 1980s,
most Mongolians worked in occupations different from those of
their parents, who were almost universally herders. These
conditions, however, were not expected to continue. Most of the
cohort, born in the late 1950s and the 1960s, who secured skilled
industrial, professional, and administrative jobs in the 1980s,
will not retire until the 2020s. The even more numerous cohort
born in the 1970s and the 1980s will find many desirable
positions already filled by those ten to fifteen years older. If
the rapid expansion of the economy, which has been fueled by
extensive Soviet aid and investment, falters in the 1990s, then
the generation born in the 1970s and the 1980s will not be able
to match the mobility rates of their elders.
Data as of June 1989
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