ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews Kazakhstan's development strategies and plans with specific attention to industry competitiveness and individual firm efficiency and interconnectedness with economic diversification, using Morris, Kaplinsky and Kaplan's 'building linkages' conceptual framework. It explores the strengths and weaknesses of Kazakhstan's development plans with respect to their usefulness in promoting economic diversification. The chapter provides a synopsis of Kazakhstan's economic history and summarises Kazakhstan's economic development policies since independence that promote diversification. It discusses the promotion of linkages in Kazakhstan in some detail, using Malaysia, a successful upper middle-income country that has used state-sponsored economic planning to diversify its economy away from natural resources, as a comparator. Compared to Kazakhstan, Malaysia introduced its local content policies (LPC) in 1974, and Petronas, the state-owned oil company, has been the main vehicle for these policies. Kazakhstan has used industrial policy since 1997 to 'cure Dutch disease' by directing capital to sectors which private capital tended to keep away from.
