D.Arvin, chairperson of the Standing Committee on Social
Policy, Education, Culture, and Science, has expressed her unhappiness that
more importance is paid to welfare distribution than to employment generation.
Her committee recently reviewed how money in the Fund for Employment Support
had been spent. An amount equivalent to 0.3% of the state budget is allocated
to Fund every year, and she and other members of the committee felt that better
results would be obtained if employment generation was made the responsibility
of an independent agency. She did not agree that a new agency would merely add
to an already large bureaucratic structure.

She revealed that according to The Ministry of Social
Welfare and Labor and the National Statistical Office there were 267,000
unemployed people in Mongolia, but a working group on social welfare has put
the number at 500,000. The wide discrepancy in computation is inexplicable, but
either figure shows that much more has to be done to create jobs in the
country.