Join our next virtual seminar – Forum for Uzbek and Silk Road Studies Virtual Seminars. The speaker is Dr Linda Tjia Yin-nor from the City University of Hong Kong, with a presentation titled “Opportunities and Challenges of China’s Automotive Projects in Kazakhstan: The Complexity and Complementarity of State-to-state Engagement and Product Diversification”.
Abstract: Kazakhstan’s political economy of automobile development is a typical state-backed process to reallocate the resource revenue to diversify the economy. Kazakhstan’s automobile sector has been shaped by its long-term multi-vector approach to engaging foreign capital and technology, including those from China. This paper traces the automobile development in Kazakhstan between 2003 and 2023 and argues that 1) Kazakhstan’s multi-vector state-to-state engagement has recently become a crucial strategy to enhance its bargaining power. Specifically, China’s state desire to connect to the West under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has given the Kazakh government more leverage to take part in the automobile’s global value chain; 2) the initial progress made in the automobile development has been complimented by specific industrial policy of localization and capacity building for further industrial upgrading; and 3) the case study of a major Sino-Kazakh automobile joint venture shed light on the importance for Kazakhstan’s automobile sector to adopt multi-vector approach in product diversification.
April 1, 1:00PM London time / 17:00PM Tashkent time
Registration link: https://wiut.us18.list-manage.com/track/click?u=e868d86a7ec9c1d101f8245ba&id=fe8c3e4cac&e=9a2261749e