We are excited to bring you Bill Bikales, an economist whose work focuses on economic and social development in China and Mongolia, in each of which he has served in senior advisory positions, including work as an advisor to the Mongolian Prime Minister’s Office from 1995-2001 and a recent stint as the Lead Economist in the Office of the United Nations Resident Coordinator in China, in addition to earlier senior posts in China for UNICEF and UNDP. He has also held long-term positions in Ukraine and the Philippines, where he served for three years as Southeast Asia Principal Economist at the Asian Development Bank. He is currently working on a multisectoral assessment of Post-Communist Mongolia’s transition to a market economy and continuing his research into fresh perspectives on China’s poverty alleviation achievements and challenges.

Bill Bikales will bust the myth that circulated widely over the last three decades, which propagated a highly inaccurate view of Mongolia’s early transition experience. That view can be summarized as: ‘International Financial Institutions (IFIs) imposed shock therapy on Mongolia, with disastrous results that caused terrible hardships for the Mongolian economy and people for many years. ’This talk will argue that this view is incorrect from beginning to end. First, Mongolia never underwent shock therapy, although there were some Mongolian economists who would have liked to, and some very partial steps toward it were indeed taken. Secondly, to the extent that it was tried it was a purely Mongolian initiative; the IFIs never imposed or even proposed any such agenda. Thirdly, and most importantly, the very real shock that the Mongolian economy and population experienced in the early 1990s was due to the abrupt end to the massive support that the Soviet Union had been providing to Mongolia in the 1980s, and to the collapse of COMECON trading arrangements into which Mongolia had been fully integrated. The reforms and external assistance from the IFIs and others were an attempt to moderate and overcome that shock; they were in no way the cause of the shock.