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Abstract

Over the past three decades, Kazakhstan has experienced a remarkable transformation from a socialist republic to an upper-middle-income, globally integrated economy. However, despite sustained GDP growth, primarily between 2000 and 2007 and early 2010s, the trajectory of this transformation has come at a high social cost: Kazakhstan today is marked by some of the deepest income and wealth inequalities in the Eurasian region. This inequality is more apparent when income and wealth concentration is examined. Between 2013 and 2023, the share of national income earned by the top 1% rose from 13.84% to 14.53%, while for the poorest (the bottom 50%), it fell from 19.16% to 18.4%. These inequalities are not incidental; rather, they are intrinsic to the political economy regime that has taken root since the early 1990s. This paper explores the structural, institutional, and ideological forces that have produced and sustained inequality in Kazakhstan, drawing from the theoretical traditions of critical political economy and heterodox development thought.

In contrast to mainstream approaches that treat inequality as a side effect of insufficient reform or weak institutions, this study argues that the Kazakh model is a paradigmatic case of neoliberal statecraft. The country’s enthusiastic adoption of market restructuring - featuring flat taxes, privatization, financial liberalization, and commodification of social services - has systematically favored capital over labor and entrenched a new class of rentier elites. The ideological ascendancy of neoclassical economics in Kazakh policymaking circles has further cemented a technocratic, depoliticized approach to inequality, where social protections are substituted by financial inclusion and GDP remains the primary development metric.

The project’s central argument is that neoliberal capitalism entrenched in the country has regressive effect on income and wealth distribution, leading to increased inequality. Drawing on recent critical political economy literature (e.g. Hudson 2014; Sayer 2015; Christophers 2020; Sanghera and Satybaldieva 2021), causal mechanisms and outcomes of the current political economy regime are examined in Kazakhstan. The study leads to the identification of components of upward distribution in contemporary capitalism. This framework explores how the neoliberal regime of capital accumulation has increasingly concentrated income and wealth through unequal ownership and control of commodities and resources. By examining inequality through the lens of political economy, this research not only challenges prevailing policy orthodoxy but also contributes to the growing call for the decolonization of development thinking in the post-socialist world.