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Anja Mihr, The central Asian economies in the twenty-first century: paving a New Silk Road, International Affairs, Volume 96, Issue 3, May 2020, Pages 827–829, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiaa071
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What role will central Asian economies play in the globalized market in the decades to come? Richard Pomfret provides an assessment of 30 years of economic development in the five post-Soviet central Asian republics and surrounding states since 1991. This is a rich and thorough analysis of a region stuck between two economic giants, Europe and China. It highlights how central Asian countries’ resource dependency led to their unwilling ties with Russia and China and how their political regimes moved ‘from communism to nationalism’ in only a few years. Both these developments significantly impacted central Asia's economic development.
Pomfret elaborates on the early struggles of the landlocked countries which, during the 1990s, disintegrated due to their autocratic regimes and their unsuccessful efforts to build nation-states first, instead of stable market economies. They increased border control and customs which seriously damaged fair and free trade and socio-economic development in the region. These measures also strengthened top-down Soviet bureaucracy, such as the propiska, that made it impossible to legally transport goods across borders and through customs due to the need to pay heavy bribes and corruption. The illegal trafficking of goods and the exploitation of resources increased and led to the collapse of state-owned public custom controls and law enforcement. Oligarchs and warlords emerged, choosing the path of policy autonomy combined with non-discriminatory multilateralism, buying imports from global least-cost suppliers such as China and selling exports (p. 228). Privately owned mega-bazaars, such as those in Osh and Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan, served as key distributors, responding to the needs and demands of people in the region.
