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Yelena Kalyuzhnova, The Kazakstani Economy: Independence and Transition. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998, xv + 168 pp., 45.00.
THIS BOOK IS ANOTHER WELL-DOCUMENTED CONTRIBUTION to the growing amount of literature that criticises the ways in which economic reforms were conducted in the former USSR and the structural adjustment programmes of the IMF and World Bank. The case of Kazakhstan, analysed by Yelena Kalyuzhnova, provides another example of lost hopes and missed opportunities during the transition era.
The book covers the economic policy, privatisation programme and structural reforms in Kazakhstan in the post-Soviet era. It also assesses ongoing changes in such key sectors of the economy as the oil and gas industry and agriculture. Kalyuzhnova argues that the legacy of the Soviet era left the Republic with a distorted economy and underdeveloped industry. She writes: `those parts of the manufacturing industry in the Kaz SSR which produced final products did not receive development' (p. 11). The unexpected disintegration of the Soviet Union and often irrational cutting-off of economic relations between the former Soviet republics contributed heavily to the economic decline of Kazakhstan's economy after 1991. These problems, in the author's view, were topped by mistakes and maladministration by the government...