Turkish Investment in Kazakhstan Bolsters Belt and Road Initiative

By Jack Resnick

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan met with Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev in Ankara on September 13 at the Third High-Level Strategic Cooperation Council to discuss improving bilateral cooperation and strengthening trade and economic relations. According to the president’s official website, the talks were targeted at developing Kazakhstan into a Central Asian regional economic hub.

Situated between Russia and China—and serving as a major transport link between the Caspian Sea and China—Kazakhstan is seen as key to China’s goal of realigning trans-Asian foreign and economic policy. Further, of all the Central Asian countries, Kazakhstan maintains the closest economic links to the EU, which receives almost 40 percent of its total exports.

Turkish investments are buttressed by the Chinese government under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Fittingly, the BRI economic plan, aimed at revitalizing the Silk Road region, was unveiled in Kazakhstan in 2013 during an official visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping. Although BRI is often cited as a unilateral Chinese initiative, Turkey has claimed a stake in the movement toward a united Asia as a long term geopolitical strategy, launching the Middle Corridor Initiative aimed at uniting Anatolia to China through Central Asia. Projects such as the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars Railway and the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route have sought to align themselves with the wider BRI.

Mithat Yenigun, vice president of the Turkish Foreign Economic Relations Board, stated that the two nations aimed to “[boost] their bilateral trade volume to $10 billion with the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway line set to work at full capacity.” Yenigun’s claims would place Turkey as Kazakhstan’s second largest trade partner, just behind Russia and just ahead of China.

The visit was preceded by the Kazakhstan-Turkey Investment Forum on September 12, also in Ankara. A Kazakh delegation led by Deputy Prime Minister Askar Mamin signed 24 commercial investment agreements that totalled $1.7 billion. The contracts are in the non-resource sector of Kazakhstan’s economy, in fields such as telecommunications, real estate development, and energy.