Russia’s war against Ukraine and the international sanctions introduced against the former have had an unexpectedly mild impact on Central Asia, despite the region’s deep economic dependence on its northern neighbour. Notwithstanding high inflation, the five Central Asian states – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan – have so far shown surprising resilience to the economic headwinds.

Russia's war against Ukraine and the international sanctions introduced against the former have had an unexpectedly mild impact on Central Asia, despite the region's deep economic dependence on its northern neighbour. Notwithstanding high inflation, the five Central Asian states - Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan - have so far shown surprising resilience to the economic headwinds.

This report takes stock of TFI progress in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, presents preliminary results for Turkmenistan for the first time, and showcases areas of TFI improvement.

Addressing barriers to private-sector development has been a long-standing ambition of the government of Uzbekistan, with an extensive programme of reforms that began in 2017 redoubling efforts to foster the growth of a more competitive and productive population of private-sector firms. Uzbekistan needs a more dynamic and innovative private sector if it is to meet the challenges and seize the opportunities of the green and digital transitions, which create a new impetus for accelerating these reforms.

While Central Asia has proven relatively resilient to the shocks of COVID-19, China’s slowdown and Russia’s war in Ukraine, declining trend rates of growth across the region, lacklustre productivity performance and lingering global uncertainty underscore the need to address weaknesses in the business and investment climate.

Kazakhstan’s trade performance has displayed remarkable resilience to recent economic shocks, including Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing international sanctions. However, connectivity remains one of the greatest challenges facing the country: its trade integration is limited by low density of settlement and economic activity, infrastructure bottlenecks, weaknesses in trade facilitation, and long distances to major markets; its economy still depends on a limited number of export commodities and a narrow range of trading partners. This report summarises the analytical guidance and capacity-building on export diversification in Kazakhstan provided by the OECD in 2022 and 2023. The report complements recent OECD work on trade connectivity in Central Asia, by focusing on practical aspects of export diversification identified in collaboration with the government of Kazakhstan: (i) how to develop export promotion policies for SMEs; (ii) how to design a one-stop shop for exporting SMEs; and (iii) how to improve cross-border co-operation in Kazakhstan’s Caspian Sea ports.

This review describes and assesses the corporate governance framework of the Kazakh SOE sector against the OECD Guidelines on Corporate Governance of State-Owned Enterprises.