Economists appointed as finance ministers, referred to as technocrats, continue to serve in Latin America, and governments that appoint them have long faced criticism for austerity measures in response to debt crises and inflation. In contrast, the region has expanded spending on social policies, especially during the economic boom of the 2000s, marking a departure from earlier austerity measures. This raises the question of whether governments that appoint technocrats have contributed to the recent increase in social spending. Using fixed-effects estimates for five middle-income countries in South America from 1990 to 2019, this paper finds that changes in social spending differ between regimes with technocrats and those with non-technocrats as finance ministers. Defining technocrats as individuals with a high level of expertise and scarce political experience, this paper shows that what matters is not how expert they are, but how politically experienced they are. Social expenditures tend to be more restrained for technocrats with limited political experience, who are less likely to respond to electoral pressure to increase such expenditures, given their alternative career paths and weaker incentives for re-election. This tendency suggests that technocrats are still associated with constraints on social spending and that governments that designate technocrats as finance ministers may constitute a structural barrier to expanding social expenditures in South America.

Commercial activities have been carried out in the Mongolian region throughout the ages, but it was only during the Qing Dynasty that remarkable development was achieved. The Traveling-Mongolia Merchants (旅蒙商), who were mainly Chinese merchants, played an important role in this development. Their activities led to the creation of markets with three different forms: grassland trading markets, local distribution markets, and periodic markets Grassland trading markets were generally formed through transactions carried out by the Traveling Merchants (行商) in the hinterland, which is the most basic form of the Traveling-Mongolia Merchants. Local distribution markets were created by setting up shops near the border between pastoral and agricultural areas and trading there with Mongolians. The periodic market was an intermediate form between the two types of trading markets mentioned above, and took place within a fixed period and at a fixed location.

These various trading markets were closely connected to each other and monopolized the trade market in the modern Mongolian region. In this paper, the Ganjuur Sum periodic market located in the Hulunbuir League of Inner Mongolia is taken as an example to explore the actual situation of periodic markets in modern Inner Mongolia and to clarify their position in the trade markets there.