The First Decade of Economic Transition in Central Asia: An Introduction to the Symposium
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The First Decade of Economic Transition in Central Asia: An Introduction to the Symposium YELENA KALYUZHNOVA The Centre for Euro-Asian Studies, The University of Reading, Whiteknights, PO Box 218, Reading RG6 6AA, UK. E-mail: [email protected] Comparative Economic Studies (2003) 45, 437–441. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ces.8100034
In the vast existing literature on economics of transition, only relatively few papers concentrate on economic developments in Central Asia (see eg Kaser, 1997a, b; Pomfret, 1995, 2002; Kalyuzhnova, 1998, 2000, 2002). This is probably because of the geographical remoteness of the region from Europe, a lack of easily available statistical data from the national statistical offices and the perception that the Central Asian transition is one of the most turbulent, with authoritarian methods of management and a mentality among the people that is vastly different from the European. Nevertheless, important economic issues have already been raised by Central Asia’s economic development, and the attention of international economic organisations has clearly ‘shifted’ towards Central Asian region (see EBRD, 2003). In light of the current demand for research evaluating of the impact of economic changes in Central Asia over the last decade, the present symposium is very timely and valuable. ‘The Central Asian economies could not follow the rapid approach due to inherited ‘regional specifics’: a complete absence of previous experience with market institutions, coordination and practice, attitudes of the population as well as the challenge of building new national economies and adapting their economic systems, which were not economic systems themselves, to the new requirements of the transition period.’ (Kalyuzhnova, 2000, 166). The first paper in the symposium is a paper by Pomfret that looks at the combination of the national accounts estimates and household survey results. The author attempts to assess the biases in GDP measures as indicators of economic well-being and ranks the five Central Asian countries’ performance in the following order: ‘better’ – Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic and
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Uzbekistan and ‘worse’ Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. The early years of transition saw a sharp decline in most sectors of these economies; however, as Pomfret has pointed out, the significant declines in real GDP overstate the situation due to the fact that the reporting bias shifted from over-reporting in the centrally planned economy to under-reporting in the market economy, and the downward bias after the transition was exacerbated by far from complete coverage of household production and new private enterprises. In addition, ‘the changing composition of output and the pervasive phenomenon of new and higher quality goods and services meant that the output changes in the early transition years are over-deflated, and the divergence between output and economic welfare exacerbated this under-representation of transition benefits’ (s
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