Paper short abstract:

Within this presentation I aim to provide economic, institutional and epistemic analysis of failure of the neoliberalism in Central Asia, discuss the prospects of the region and search for the most appropriate dimensions for further research on the Central Asian region.

Paper long abstract:

Economic science has long been represented by scholastic free market oriented theories of Classical and Neoclassical Economics with their offsprings (mainstream), and so called “the Other Canon” (E.Reinert, 2011), represented by numerous practice-based schools (like German Historical School, Institutional Economics, etc.) The Other Canon principles helped developing most of industrialized nations, while the mainstream served the ideological functions to them. Real-life implementation of the principles of the mainstream economics brought to economic downturn and negative social outcomes.

Within this panel I aim to provide economic, institutional and epistemic analysis of failure of the neoliberalism in Central Asia, discuss the prospects of the region and search for the most appropriate dimensions for further research on the Central Asian region.

After the collapse of the USSR the post-Soviet “transition economies” embraced ideas of globalization and de-regulated markets, because they believed that the prosperity of the Western world was based on this mode. Some of the states, like Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia, implemented neoliberal reforms in full scale, the others, like Kazakhstan, took some elements of the so called “Washington Consensus”. There were very few states in the post-Socialist world (like Uzbekistan) that fully ignored fast transition to market economy. They have been criticized for a lack of economic reforms, but have shown the best results in economic development.

A key question in this context is why the much propagated economic and social theories did not give the expected results, and more autocratic regimes have shown better economic outcomes. We should understand if the “bad luck of neoliberalism” results from such phenomena as (neo)patrimonialism, state capture, patronage and clientelism, nepotism, and corruption, or, probably, vice versa, those phenomena appeared as a result of radical market reforms, as it was shown by A.Tutumlu (2019) on the case of Kazakhstan, and probably consequently caused higher conflict potential in the region. To answer this question I propose to study the nexus between economic development, institutional dynamics, and political conflicts in the region. In particular, I seek to shed light on how political instability and conflict can be causally linked to different economic models and the welfare distributions they produce on the one hand, and the dynamics of institutional frameworks in both formal and informal perspectives, with their varying levels of authoritarianism and state capture, on the other.