Poor transport

Dorjderem Dorjgotov owns a small wool processing company in Bayan-Ulgii, a province of western Mongolia endowed with endless steppes and close to the Russian border. The province produces 90% of the processed wool Mongolia exports to Europe. “We also want to export to China, but the transport costs are too high,” says Mrs. Dorjderem, one of many entrepreneurs who suffer from severely inadequate transport infrastructure in this part of the country, where dirt tracks meandering over the steppes barely connect one small village to another, making travel both slow and costly. Bayan-Ulgii, Khovd, and Uvs, the remote and sparsely populated western provinces of Mongolia, are home to some 185,000 people, and are much less developed than other parts of the country due to their isolation. Per capita GDP in the region is 75% of the national average and the poverty rate in 2009 was 47%, compared with the national rate of 35.2%... — blogs.adb.org/blog