Economic Reality: Mining, Debt, Media, and Information Markets

Abstract

This chapter explores the confluence of the informational economy and extractive capitalism in Mongolia over the twenty-first century. Media outlets have proliferated, partly thanks to the growth of foreign investment in the mining sector. I discuss how mining contributes to the country’s debt accumulation and environmental degradation in comparison to the ICT sector, utilizing the ratios between the direct investment and the contributions to the country’s GDP following Thomas Piketty’s (2014) political economy analysis. The money from mining feeds back into media institutions that cover the industries. I argue that the formation of a national epistemic community in the ICT sector in the late 1990s and the lack of such a community in the mining sector made differences in how the two sectors contributed to Mongolian society.