Ring round Almaty
Kazakhstan has been promising to improve its creaky old internal infrastructure for years. It took a series of events outside its control to push politicians in Almaty and the capital Astana to take their own pledge seriously.
The first event was the rapid fall-off in global oil prices, which came as a shock to the resource-rich central Asian nation. A reformist legislator, Karim Massimov, brought back to serve a second term as prime minister, was vested with the task of selling underperforming state assets, accelerating its long dormant public-private partnership programme and directing tax revenues into infrastructure projects to boost growth.
The second event involved — as it so often does these days — the rise of China. China’s plans under president Xi Jinping to rebuild the overland Silk Road route connecting the People’s Republic with Europe, via Russia and central Asia, was a major boon to Kazakh officials.
In May Jin Liqun, chairman of China’s new globally oriented multilateral, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, told GlobalCapital (GlobalMarkets’ sister publication) that it planned to help fund a new, 66km long ring road encircling Almaty. Expected to cost $680m, it will also be funded by the World Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. A host of other PPP projects are also in the pipeline, including a light rail project in Almaty and a maintenance contract for the planned China-Russia highway set to link Moscow with Beijing.