Since 2002, the Mongolian National Statistical Office (NSO) and the World Bank have engaged in extensive co-operation involving staff capacity building and jointly developing a methodology for studying household income expenditure, living standard surveys and poverty measurement.

Today (17th of October), the NSO and the World Bank jointly announced the poverty data for 2016. The results show that the poverty rate has increased to 907 thousand households since 2014; in other words, one in three people in Mongolia (which has a population of three million). The number of people living below the poverty line increased by 300 thousand between 2014 and 2016. The poverty level is highest in rural areas of the country. Another fact disclosed today is that 1.3 million people, or 42.2 percent of the population, are in debt.