Mongolia - Property Rights - Special Hashaa Plot

Households living in hashaa plots in the ger districts of Mongolia's three largest cities: Ulaanbaatar, Darkhan, and Erdenet.
8,552 plots were identified for surveying for the sample. Of these, 6,344 were occupied households and 5,816 were successfully interviewed for a response rate of 68%. 528 households refused to participate in the survey and 2,068 plots were unoccupied, had no one present at the time of any of the survey attempts, or were invalid plots. Plots found to be unoccupied or to be owned or occupied by a business or state entities were deemed unsuitable for the survey and were dropped from the sample. Geographic Information System data on all hashaa plots in the ger areas of the relevant districts of the capital and in Darkhan and Erdenet, were obtained from the PRP PIU. The ownership status of many of these plots was recorded in this GIS data set, though the ownership status information was known to be out of date and inaccurate. The boundaries of administrative units such as city, district, khoroo, and kheseg were also included. IPA processed the GIS data using ArcGIS and Stata computer software.

Once the GIS and administrative cadastral data sets were integrated, sample selection was stratified by kheseg, a geographical unit roughly equivalent to a neighborhood in the United States. First, the number of program-eligible plots per kheseg was calculated. Plots listed as “fully registered” in the GIS data were not included in this calculation since they would not be eligible for project assistance. Weights were then calculated for each kheseg unit that measured the proportion of the total number of eligible plots located in this unit. These weights were then multiplied by 8,000, the total number of plots it was deemed desirable and feasible to include in survey activities, to determine the number of plots to be sampled from each kheseg. After the sample size for each kheseg was determined, plots were randomly selected for inclusion in the survey.


In November of 2010, the survey contractor selected by MCA-M began administering the questionnaire to the households residing on and/or owning the plots selected during the sampling process. Due to the anticipated errors in the Geographic Information System data, not all of the hashaa plots selected for the SHPS sample were occupied. In addition, Mongolian households are extremely mobile. To minimize these challenges, the survey teams were required to make four attempts to locate the hashaa plot to determine the registration status and an additional four attempts to complete the survey questionnaire. Unfortunately, the SHPS had to be suspended after several weeks of data collection due to unforeseen delays in project implementation. The scope of the project was subsequently adjusted and the project implementation areas shifted due to the inflexibility of the data collection contract. The scope of the project was reduced from covering all districts in Ulaanbaatar to covering only the three largest districts, Bayanzurkh, Chingeltei, and Songinokhairkhan.


The response rate was 68%.