COMMENTS ON KEITH GRIFFINS'S BOOK ON POVERTY IN MONGOLIA

Keith Griffin, editor, Poverty Reduction in Mongolia, Asia Pacific Press, Australia, 2003. 161 pages, ISBN 0 7315 3695 9.

The volume has five contributors. Keith Griffin, who is overall editor, is Professor of Economics at the University of California, Riverside, and former President of Magdalen College, Oxford, England. He writes that he was an advisor and consultant to many government, international agencies and academic institutions in Asia, Africa and Latin America. In 1994 he led a large mission to Mongolia to report on poverty alleviation and published his findings in 1995 in the work Poverty and the Transition to a Market Economy in Mongolia.

Mark Brenner is Assistant Research Professor at the Political Economy Research Institute at the university of Massachusetts in Amherst, Massachusetts; USA. He specializes in development and labor economics, especially poverty, income distribution and low wage labor markets in Asia and Africa. He has worked for the International Labor Organization (ILO) and the UNDP as a consultant.

Amy Ickowitz seems to be a graduate student working with Dr. Griffin. She is a doctoral candidate in economics at the University of California, Riverside working in development and environmental economics. Her dissertation work is on Cameroon, Africa cultivation and deforestation.

Takayoshi Kusago, is a Poverty Advisor in the UNDP Bureau for Development Policy in Bangkok. He had been a professor at Hokkaido University and Meiji Gakuin University in labor economics, social development, and public policy. He was a World Bank consultatnt on labor markets in Malaysia and Mauritius and on Indonesian and Nepalese women’s projects for the ILO.

Terry McKinley, is Senior Policy Adviser on poverty and macroeconomic policies in the Bureau for Development Policy at the UNDP in New York. Much of his recent research has been devoted to China, Vietnam and Central Asia, and the transition economies of the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe.

Keith Griffin wrote the short Preface and Introduction.

The book has 31 Tables and 2 Figures, 5 page bibliography, and 9 page index. Ten World Bank studies, 5 of Griffin’s previous publications, 4 UNDP studies, 2 USAID studies, as well as 4 unpublished manuscripts are among the references.