Economic overview of Kazakhstan (from akorda.kz)

Kazakhstan is important to world energy markets because it has significant oil and natural gas reserves. With sufficient export options, Kazakhstan could become one of the world's largest oil producers and exporters in the next decade. But Kazakhstan’s strategic aspiration is to become a modern, diversified economy with a high value added and high-tech component, well integrated in to the global economy.

Energy sector is viewed as a good basis to achieve this goal

The perspective of the Kazakhstan economy is closely connected with further integration into international economic relations, utilisation of unique reserves of energy and mineral resources, vast possibilities to export industrial and agricultural products, optimum employment of country's transit potential and also with availability of highly qualified specialists in different spheres. During the Soviet period Kazakhstan was an agrarian, raw materials supplier of the former Soviet economy, where the military industry played the major role. The main economic content of more than 10 years of independence has become transition from the central command planning to a market system.

During these years, Kazakhstan has made considerable progress in implementing complex political, economic and social reforms to establish a democratic state with a market economy.

While the country has not experienced political disturbances during the transition period, it has faced numerous economic, social and environmental challenges.

The first few years of Kazakhstan’s independence were characterized by an economic decline (mostly due to the destabilizing force of disintegration of the Soviet Union): by 1995 real GDP dropped to 61,4% of its 1990 level. This economic deterioration exceeded the losses experienced during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The wide-ranging inflation observed in the early 1990s peaked at annual rate of up to 3000% in mid-nineties. Since 1992, Kazakhstan has actively pursued a programme of economic reform designed to establish a free market economy through privatisation of state enterprises and deregulation and today is generally considered to be more advanced in this respect than most other countries of the CIS. Kazakhstan remains one of the most successful reformers in the CIS, though its record is less strong when compared with more advanced transition countries of Central and Eastern Europe, and it has the strongest banking system in Central Asia and CIS.

The main goals of current structural policy are diversification and the strengthening of the non-oil sector. A number of development agencies and research centres (Development Institutions) have been established and the Government is looking at establishing techno and science parks to support the diversification of higher-value added industries.