NOV. 30 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) pledged to increase its investment plans in Kazakhstan to $1b in 2017. So far in 2016, the EBRD has invested around $900m. At a meeting in Shymkent in Southern Kazakhstan, EBRD country director Janet Heckman also pledged increased investment in the utility sector.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 307, published on Dec. 2 2016)
NOV. 23 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Azerbaijan expects its economy to grow by 1% in 2017 and 1.5% in 2018, a draft budget from the government seen by Reuters showed. The day before, the World Bank reiterated that it expected the economy to contract by 3% this year. Azerbaijan has been particularly hard hit by falling oil prices. Its economy is particularly oil-dependent.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 306, published on Nov. 25 2016)
ALMATY/TARAZ, Kazakhstan, NOV. 21 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — A stubborn, painful economic downturn has wiped 4% off the average Kazakhs’ purchasing power, the ranking.kz website reported, forcing people to cut out luxury items — especially those imported from abroad.
Aiganym Dosmail, who works in an advertising agency in Almaty, said that she had cut out on buying luxury items that had been imported and ballooned in price since the devaluation of the tenge last year.
“I optimise my spending. Previously, I bought a lot of unnecessary stuff and now I buy only those goods that last long and are good quality. It is of course sad that previously marsh- mallows cost 300 tenge and now they cost 800 tenge,” she told the Bulletin.
The tenge lost half its value last year after the government reluctantly cut its peg to the US dollar. Low oil prices and a recession in Russia had pressured the Kazakh economy, and others across the region, into currency devaluations and budget cuts.
Worst hit are importers of luxury goods. Most Kazakhs now can’t afford to buy the foreign goods that they could afford even a year earlier.
Unlike Ms Dosmail, Aigerim Zhanuzak’s hairdressing salon in Taraz in the south of the country has been far less affected. She said that most of her clients are self-styled middle class Kazakhs and that she hasn’t had to put up her costs because she doesn’t have may import costs.
“My salon is targeting middle income and higher class people which means the crisis doesn’t impact people when it comes to personal comfort. People always want to eat and lto ook good,” she said. “If we talk about the financial crisis in our town then it has hit the lower-income population. Goods have become more expensive, public transport as well, but salaries have not increased, unfortunately.”
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 306, published on Nov. 25 2016)
NOV. 19 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Armenia’s economy is virtually broken and needs major reform if it is going to survive, the country’s new PM Karen Karapetyan told Bloomberg in an interview.
Parachuted into the job in September after a series of crises pushed trust and credibility in the previous PM to near breaking point, Mr Karapetyan is the former Gazprom executive and former mayor of Yerevan, who President Serzh Sargsyan has tasked with transforming the Armenian economy.
Corruption and the dominance of a handful of well-connected oligarchs, who control most of the lucrative import businesses, need to be countered, Mr Karapetyan said.
“We’re proposing the most rapid change that’s possible,” he said. “We will create an even, competitive, level- playing field.”
And the ruling Republican party needs to do something fairly radical if it is going to have any chance of holding on to parliament after an election in May. In July this year, hundreds of young Armenians clashed with police in support of a group of gunmen who had captured a police station, highlighting frustration with the government.
In the interview, Mr Karapetyan also said that he wanted to cut government spending to halve the state deficit, a difficult objective if you also need to win votes.
“We also have external debt growing faster than the GDP growth and growing faster than revenues,’’ he said.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 306, published on Nov. 25 2016)
NOV. 18 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Armenia plans to issue its second ever eurobond by 2019 or 2020, finance minister Arshaluys Margaryan told Reuters. Mr Margaryan did not specify the size of the eurobond. Armenia issued its first eurobond in 2013. It was dubbed the Kardashian bond, after Armenian- American actress Kim Kardashian, and was valued at $700m.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 306, published on Nov. 25 2016)
NOV. 24 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — The IMF downgraded Georgia’s economic growth to 2.7% this year, from an earlier estimate of 3.4%. The downgrade was due, it said to a slightly bigger than expected drop in remittances and exports. It also downgraded growth in 2017 to 4% from 5.2%. Like the rest of the region, a recession in Russia and falling currency values have hit Georgia’s economy.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 306, published on Nov. 25 2016)
NOV. 16 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — In a speech to parliament to present the government’s budget plans for 2017, Tajikistan’s finance minister Abdusalom Kurboniyon said that the government’s debt measured 36.3% of its GDP, slightly higher than last year. Tajikistan’s debt ratio has been rising over the past couple of years because of an economic downturn triggered by a fall in oil prices and a recession in Russia. In 2014, Tajikistan’s debt to GDP ratio had been around 28%.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 305, published on Nov. 18 2016)
NOV. 15 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Armenia’s Central Bank cut its key interest rate by 0.25% to 6.5%, its lowest level since at least 201. The Central Bank has been steadily cutting interest rates throughout the year to try to combat falling inflation. At the start of the year, Armenia’s interest rate had been set at 8.75%. The Central Bank said that economic activity was still slow and that it expected soft inflationary pressures to continue.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 305, published on Nov. 18 2016)
NOV. 18 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — The Kazakh government has cancelled plans to build either a thermal or nuclear power station despite saying for the past decade that an upgrade to its power generating system was vital.
At a press briefing earlier this month in Astana, Kazakh Energy Minister Kanat Bozumbayev said that, despite predictions of the opposite, Kazakhstan actually now has a surplus of power.
“We see no deficit within the next seven years, so we see no [need to build] new facilities such as a nuclear power plant within the next seven years,” he said. This is an important statement for two reasons. Firstly Bozumbayev is doing future generations of Kazakhs a disservice. Secondly he is not being honest with this current generation of Kazakhs.
Both the short-termism and the dishonesty are worrying. Kazakhstan needs more power. Just ask people living in Almaty who have to deal with an increasing number of brownouts. As the country has modernised and grown wealthier, electricity consumption has soared. World Bank data showed that in 2013, Kazakhstan’s per capita electricity consumption was 4,892 kilowatt hours, up from a post-Soviet low in 1999 of 2,838 kilowatt hours.
At the same time, Kazakhstan’s population has grown from just under 15m people in 1999 to just over 17m people in 2015.
Kazakhstan prevaricated for years with various suitors over building a new nuclear power station, its Soviet-era nuclear power station had been decommissioned in 2001, but earlier this year said it had scrapped the idea.
In September, Kazakhstan and Korea’s Samsung also finally admitted that its mothballed $2.5b plan to build a coal-fired power station on the shores of Lake Balkhash to feed electricity to Almaty had also been scrapped.
And here’s the hard truth, the real reason that Kazakh officials said they don’t need a new power station is that Kazakhstan’s finances are currently not up to funding the construction of one.
Last year, Samsung Engineering CEO Park Jung-heum said he had mothballed the Balkhash thermal power project “because of an issue with the Kazakhstan government over the guaranteed purchase of the power to be produced from the project.”
Power generation plans in Kazakhstan have become the latest victim of the economic downturn. The government should admit this and lay plans to boost production as soon as they can afford to.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 305, published on Nov. 18 2016)
NOV. 10 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — In the first nine months of the year, Kyrgyzstan said that its exports had fallen by 9% and imports by 4.5%. The data confirms the view that the economies of Central Asia are still being squeezed by an economic downturn triggered in 2014 by a drop in oil prices. The drop in oil prices tipped Russia’s economy into a recession. Russia is the regional economic driver.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 305, published on Nov. 18 2016)
