On December 14, President Nazarbayev addressed the Nation from the stage of a new Opera and Ballet Theatre already touted as one of the Kazakhstani capital’s most beautiful buildings and the living proof of its success as a rapidly growing cultural hub of the entire Central Asia. Although Nazarbayev previously made a traditional address to the Nation in January 2012, in the wake of early parliamentary elections, he chose the end of the year to unveil a vast policy speech commonly known as “Kazakhstan-2050,” since it outlines the country’s goals for its future development up to the middle of the 21st century.

In October 1997, two months before it was formally decided to transfer Kazakhstan’s capital city from Almaty in the south to Astana in the center of its large territory, President Nazarbayev was preparing to deliver his famous speech about the country’s development policy up to 2030. The practical translation of this strategy was made possible through the subsequent adoption of several long-term documents, such as the Strategic Development Plan for 2010 approved in 2001 and its logical successor for 2020 adopted by the Kazakhstani Government a decade later.

Following a long enumeration of the country’s successes on the political, economic and social fronts, which had made further steps to implement the “Kazakhstan-2030” strategy literally redundant, Nazarbayev presented a dozen challenges posed by the contemporary system of global affairs. He spoke about growing democratic imbalances, increasingly pronounced food insecurity risks, and marked water deficits, which is particularly relevant in post-Soviet Central Asia. The Kazakhstani president also mentioned the need to sustain energy self-sufficiency in light of the exhaustibility of mineral resources.

Although Kazakhstan is still home to several highly promising oil and gas deposits, including the supergiant oilfield of Kashagan on the Caspian Sea, the exploration of such reserves becomes increasingly expensive and technically complex and should encourage national authorities to devise new ways to produce energy for the country’s economic needs. Finally, in Nazarbayev’s view, the unending turmoil on the world’s financial markets, growing social instability, and the crisis of traditional values are all factors contributing to the development of a coherent national response mobilizing new types of resources and novel ideologies.

According to Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan’s foremost objective in this first half of the 21st century should be economic development in order to let it become one of the world’s thirty most developed nations by 2050. For this ambitious goal to be achieved, Kazakhstan will now be using its budgetary funds with increased pragmatism, mostly via their investment into long-term nationwide projects pursuing the objectives of economic diversification and infrastructure development. A special tax regime is now being envisaged for those businesses that privilege innovative technologies and focus on the transfer of know-how. At the same time, Kazakhstan is planning to conduct a comprehensive overhaul of the existing tax system in order to facilitate the submission of tax returns, reduce administrative expenditure, and create additional filters against corruption.

Even though the emphasis on the innovative development is once again at the forefront of Kazakhstan’s economic outlook, the energy sector is still at the heart of its plan to stimulate domestic growth. Kazakhstan’s government was instructed to tear down licensing restrictions for subsoil users first introduced in 2010. Local governments will now have authority to issue subsoil permits provided that companies invest in the local economy, create jobs, and contribute to social security. Furthermore, Nazarbayev suggested establishing a “strategic hydrocarbon reserve” apparently modeled on the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve started in 1975 after the 1973 oil crisis. 

The Kazakhstani leader further said that the Government would progressively decrease the budget deficit from the expected 2.1 percent in 2013 to 1.5 percent in 2015, while also keeping the level of sovereign debt tightly capped. By way of diversification, the share of non-extractive industries in the total volume of Kazakhstan’s exports should grow twofold by 2025 and threefold by 2040. Also, the Government would launch this year an infrastructure development program aimed at doubling the volume of commercial transit via Kazakhstani territory by 2020 and reaching a tenfold increase no later than 2050. In order to tackle the problem of food insecurity, the share of agriculture in the country’s GDP is expected to grow by a factor of five by the middle of the century, and the level of state support for agricultural production should increase by almost 350 percent by the end of this decade. Additionally, the weight of small and medium businesses in Kazakhstan’s annual production is scheduled to at least double by 2030.

Finally, President Nazarbayev confirmed his country’s commitment to its multi-vector foreign policy, specifically citing the deepening of integration within the Customs Union with Russia and Belarus and the establishment of a Eurasian Economic Union.