- Princeton University Press
The Central Asian Economies in the Twenty-First Century: Paving a New Silk Road
Key Metrics
- Richard Pomfret
- Princeton University Press
- Hardcover
- 9780691182216
- 9.3 X 6.3 X 1.1 inches
- 1.35 pounds
- Business & Economics > Development - Economic Development
- English
Book Description
This book analyzes the Central Asian economies of Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, from their buffeting by the commodity boom of the early 2000s to its collapse in 2014. Richard Pomfret examines the countries' relations with external powers and the possibilities for development offered by infrastructure projects as well as rail links between China and Europe.
The transition of these nations from centrally planned to market-based economic systems was essentially complete by the early 2000s, when the region experienced a massive increase in world prices for energy and mineral exports. This raised incomes in the main oil and gas exporters, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan; brought more benefits to the most populous country, Uzbekistan; and left the poorest countries, the Kyrgyz Republic and Tajikistan, dependent on remittances from migrant workers in oil-rich Russia and Kazakhstan. Pomfret considers the enhanced role of the Central Asian nations in the global economy and their varied ties to China, the European Union, Russia, and the United States. With improved infrastructure and connectivity between China and Europe (reflected in regular rail freight services since 2011 and China's announcement of its Belt and Road Initiative in 2013), relaxation of United Nations sanctions against Iran in 2016, and the change in Uzbekistan's presidency in late 2016, a window of opportunity appears to have opened for Central Asian countries to achieve more sustainable economic futures.
Author Bio
Dr. Richard Pomfret has been Professor of Economics at the University of Adelaide since 1992. Before coming to Adelaide, he was Professor of Economics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington DC, Bologna (Italy) and Nanjing (China).
He previously worked at Concordia University in Montréal and the Institut für Weltwirtschaft at the University of Kiel in Germany. He has also held visiting positions at universities in Australia, Canada, China, France, Italy and the USA, and is an honorary Fellow of the Centre for Euro-Asian Studies at the University of Reading, UK, of Monash University European Centre, of the Centre for Social and Economic Research (CASE) in Warsaw, and of the research centre ROSES-CNRS at Université-Paris I.
Richard Pomfret has acted as adviser to the Australian government and to international organizations such as the World Bank, Asian Development Bank and United Nations Development Programme. In 1993 he was seconded to the United Nations for a year, acting as adviser on macroeconomic policy to the Asian republics of the former Soviet Union. He has also worked at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris on several occasions while on leave from Adelaide.
His research interests centre on economic development and international economics, and he has published over a hundred papers in these fields. He has written seventeen books, including Investing in China 1979-1989; Ten Years of the Open Door Policy (1991), The Economics of Regional Trading Arrangements (1997; paperback edition 2001), Constructing a Market Economy: Diverse Paths from Central Planning in Asia and Europe (2002),
The Central Asian Economies since Independence (2006), Regionalism in East Asia (2011),The Age of Equality: The twentieth century in economic perspective, published by Harvard University Press (2011) and Trade Facilitation, co-authored with Patricia Sourdin and published by Edward Elgar (2012). He has also written textbooks on international trade and on development economics, and edited a textbook on Australian trade policies.
Source: The University of Adelaide
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