Average life expectancy in Mongolia is 65 years, much shorter than that of other East Asian countries such as South Korea (78.5 years) and China (72.5 years). Furthermore, healthy life expectancy in Mongolia is even shorter, rendering the situation even more tragic. The World Health Organization estimates that the healthy life expectancy is 53 years for males and 58 years for females.

This colloquium will provide an overview of health in Mongolia and its healthcare system, with expertise from two speakers. First, Dr. Gendengarjaa Baigalimaa, Developing Asia Health Policy Fellow at Shorenstein APARC, will discuss her comparative study of how knowledge of cervical cancer risk factors has influenced behavior changes in Mongolia before and after the introduction of the National Cervical Cancer Program.

Second, Dr. Dashdorj will present on overview of the healthcare initiatives of the Onom Foundation, designed to mitigate excess and premature mortality of Mongolians via knowledge transfer and entrepreneurship. He will report on a March national health policy meeting in Mongolia’s capital and recent strides in health improvement made with the support of the Onom Foundation.

Gendengarjaa Baigalimaa joins the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) during the 2013-2014 academic year as the Developing Asia Health Policy Fellow. She joins APARC from the Mongolian National Cancer Center, where she serves as a Gynecological Oncologist.

During her appointment as Health Policy Fellow, she is completing her comparative study of how knowledge of cervical cancer risk factors has influenced behavior changes in Mongolia before and after the introduction of the National Cervical Cancer Program.

Baigalimaa is the Executive Director of Mongolian Society of Gynecological Oncologists and is also a member of the International Gynecological Cancer Society (IGCS) in Mongolia, Russia, and France.

Baigalimaa holds a MD from Minsk Belarussia Medical University. She also received a Masters in Health Science from Mongolian Medical University. She is fluent in both Russian and English.

Dr. Dashdorj hails from very humble beginnings. He was born and raised in the southwestern outskirts of Mongolia known as Gobi-Altay province, where the Altay Mountains border with the bare rock covered desert basins of the Gobi. Because of the unique upbringing, Dr. Dashdorj has a profound commitment for making a tangible difference in lives of fellow Mongols. At the same time, he strongly believes that entrepreneurship is the best vehicle for making a difference.

He obtained a Ph.D. in physics from Purdue University in 2005 and was a postdoctoral fellow at the US National Institutes of Health. His research using ultrafast optical spectroscopy and time-resolved x-ray imaging techniques is published in 17 original manuscripts in prominent, peer-reviewed scientific journals, such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2010, Dr. Dashdorj became a faculty member at the Argonne National Laboratory. Despite his successes in scientific research, he gave up his academic career in 2013 to pursue his entrepreneurial dreams, since he truly believed that he can make a tangible difference via entrepreneurship, experimenting with a model of subsidizing philanthropic actions by a certain percentage of equity and profits of a for-profit company.

We use retrospectively reported data on smoking behavior of residents of Mainland China and Taiwan to compare and contrast patterns in smoking behavior over the life-course of individuals in these two regions. Because we construct the life-history of smoking for all survey respondents, our data cover an exceptionally long period of time – up to fifty years in both samples. During this period, both societies experienced substantial social and economic changes. The two regions developed at much different rates and the political systems of the two areas evolved in very different ways. More importantly, governments in the two areas set policies that caused the flow of information about the health risks of smoking to differ across the regions and over time. We exploit these differences, using counts of articles in newspapers from 1951 to present, to explore whether and how the arrival of information affected life-course smoking decisions of residents in the two areas. We also present evidence that suggests how prices/taxes and key historical events might have affected decisions to smoke.

Dean Lillard received his PhD in economics from the University of Chicago in 1991. From 1991 to 2012, he was a faculty member and senior research associate in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University. In August 2012 he joined the Department Human Sciences at Ohio State University as an Associate Professor. He is Director and Project Manager of the Cross-National Equivalent File study that produces cross-national data. He is a member of the American Economics Association, the Population Association of America, the International Association for Research on Income and Wealth, the International Health Economics Association, the American Society for Health Economics, a Research Associate at the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin, Germany, and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He serves on the advisory board of the Danish National Institute for Social Research in Copenhagen, Denmark and the Cross-National Studies: Interdisciplinary Research and Training Program – a collaborative program run by the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN), and together with the Mershon Centre at OSU.

Dean Lillard's current research focuses on health economics, the economics of schooling, and international comparisons of economic behavior. His research in health economics is primarily focused on the economics of the marketing and consumption of cigarettes and alcohol. His research on the economics of schooling includes studies of direct effects of policy on educational outcomes and on the role that education plays in other economic behaviors such as smoking, production of health, and earnings. His cross-national research ranges widely from comparisons of the role that obesity plays in determining labor market outcomes to comparisons of smoking behavior cross-nationally.