ABSTRACT
Throughout its history, economic development in Kazakhstan has been linked inextricably to the development of an impressively diverse resource base. At the turn of the twentieth century, enterprises exploiting oil, coal, copper, gold, lead, and zinc deposits were the core of an emerging industrial economy. The enterprises themselves, as well as the more general reliance on resource extraction rather than manufacturing, were to remain at the heart of the Kazakhstan’s economy for over 100 years. After the substantial disruption of World War I followed by the October Revolution, economic recovery and expansion under the new Bolshevik government was little more than rebuilding the existing enterprises and finishing projects started earlier. Expansion followed along with investments in infrastructure both to transport commodities and to support the many workers needed to operate the mines, oil fields, and processing plants. After World War II, investments continued to concentrate on developing the resource sectors even though the costs of development in remote areas were increasingly burdensome, and Kazakhstan’s economy remained dependent on the extraction and preliminary processing of its many resources. The economy of no other Soviet republic was so concentrated in these sectors, and it is hard to name an economy anywhere in the world with such a substantial proportion of its industrial structure in resource-based enterprises.
