Economic cooperation between Turkey and Mongolia, ethnic Kazakhs moving from eastern Mongolia to western Kazakhstan, etc.

Flag of Bayan-Ölgii Province in western Mongolia, where all the Kazakhs live.

Here's some news in Turkish related to Mongolia I found today.

• 4 December: State Minister and deputy prime minister Hayati Yazıcı and Mongolia's Environment and Tourism Minister Luimed Gansukh participated in a signing ceremony at the 5th Turkey-Mongolia Mixed Economic Commission (KEK) in Ankara.
• Cooperation between Turkey and Mongolia (4 December): This is about the same economic commission above: Yazıcı said that they were aiming to increase trade between the two countries in the coming two years to 50 million dollars. They also agreed on creating a Turkish Export Product Fair in Ulan Bataar in the year 2010 and the setting up of a Turkish-Mongolian Work Forum. Mongolia also has a so-called "40,000 Housing Units Program" that you can see more information about here. According to the site housing is quite easy to find in Mongolia, but housing that meets international standards is quite rare: "Finding a house or apartment and office space is very easy in Mongolia...Virtually all buildings in Mongolia were constructed using Soviet models and methods. But because of this there is limited housing, office or factory space available that fully meets western standards. Almost all buildings rely on the central heating and hot water systems and suffer periodic power, telephone, hot water and heating outages, especially during the peak demand season in the winter."
• By the end of this year, 800 Kazakh families in western Mongolia (where a lot of ethnic Kazakhs live) will cross the border from the Bayan-Ölgii Province (Баян-Өлгий) into East Kazakhstan (Шығыс Қазақстан облысы), which is on the east side of the country so not that far a distance from where they are now. Another 1000 families are supposed to make the move next year as well. East Kazakhstan's Governor B.S. Adilgazi visited the Mongolian province with some Kazakh officials a few days back. The families that make the move are going to receive credit to start their own work and make houses.

If you take a look at the Wikipedia article for the Mongolian province, you also find the following:

After democratization, many inhabitants moved to their historical homeland, Kazakhstan, assuming they would find a better future there. The result was a noticeable loss of population in 1991-1993, when approx. 30,000 were repatriated to Kazakhstan. As it turned out though, Kazakhstan suffered much more from the consequences of former socialist rule than Mongolia did, so that most were disappointed in their hopes. A noticeable number of former immigrants have been returning, so that the population has risen again noticeably.

So it looks like this is their second attempt at bringing people over from Mongolia into Kazakhstan. It should work much better this time around considering that even in spite of the economic slowdown Kazakhstan is predicting 5 percent growth for 2009, and just the fact that it's so much better off now than it was in the early 90s.