Abstract

This study analyzes the reform aimed at enhancing the status of public servants in Kazakhstan, specifically teachers. The 2020 reform led to an increase in teachers’ salaries and provides an opportunity to examine the dynamics of wage growth across different contexts.

Over the past decade, teacher salaries have become one of the key elements of education policy in Central Asian countries. Salary increases have been viewed as a tool for improving the quality of human capital, as well as a measure to attract and retain personnel in the public sector and to reduce regional disparities in the availability of qualified specialists.

Designing incentive systems for public sector teachers remains a major challenge, and contemporary public sector reforms are often characterized by the introduction of business-oriented incentive mechanisms, particularly pay-for-performance schemes in public institutions. At the same time, a number of studies have shown that such reforms do not always produce clearly positive outcomes for public servants in the social sector.

Kazakhstan has followed a path of maintaining centralized control and the stavka-based system, while achieving a significant increase in the average salaries of school teachers through the introduction of a qualification system and a range of additional payments linked to subjects taught and working conditions.

This paper is primarily empirical in nature. It uses panel data on individual teacher salaries for 2019–2024, based on de-identified data from the Bureau of National Statistics of the Republic of Kazakhstan. The study documents how teachers’ salaries evolved over a five-year period that included a major policy change. In addition, it takes into account structural characteristics of schools in 2022 and 2024, including distance to the regional center, the number of students and teachers, and other factors.

By shifting the focus from teachers as a professional group to wage reform as a governance mechanism, the paper contributes to debates on state capacity, inequality, and policy implementation. The findings highlight the importance of context in shaping the actual effects of seemingly universal social reforms.

Although discussions often emphasize the common structure of such reforms, less attention has been paid to how wage dynamics vary across contexts after their implementation. This article contributes to that discussion by providing an empirical analysis of post-reform wage trajectories using individual-level administrative data.