ABSTRACT
Although there have been instances during the transition to market where western financial assistance has elicited economic and, occasionally, political reform within the CCA region, the momentum has tended to flag and the political regimes have regressed, with one or two exceptions. This is so, even though the leverage of the international financial institutions (IFIs) strengthened in several of the Central Asian countries as a consequence of sharply rising external debt. Chapters 7 and 8 have argued that opposition to reform is rooted in a combination of the general absence of serious challenges to the political power of the incumbent elite and the legacy of dependent social capital from central planning within the FSU. This combination has helped to consolidate authoritarian regimes, which maintain their power through long-established patronage systems built on loyalty to family and regional associates rather than to national welfare. One consequence is a disconnection between the aims of the central, oblast and local governments on the one hand, whose prime goal is to capture and redistribute rent, and on the other hand the aims of the IFIs, with their long-term vision of economic and political reform towards global integration. Even if a central government were prepared to incur the wrath of disappointed clients as well as patrons at lower tiers of government by espousing reform, it would struggle to implement it. Under such circumstances, efficiency gains from reform tend to be diluted at best and at worst, reform stalls in a twilight of the plan, which combines relatively high levels of economic intervention by the state with limited competition to maximize scope for rent-seeking (Aslund 2000).
