Kazakhstan
Logo of Kazakhstan’s national tourist company
Kazakhstan is a vast country larger than Western Europe that shares a 7,644 km border with Russia and 1,782 km border with China. With a multi-ethnic population of nearly nineteen million, Kazakhstan has enjoyed political stability and rapid economic growth following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 and Independence a year later.
Now the strongest economy in Central Asia, oil and gas-rich Kazakhstan links the fast-growing markets of China and South Asia with those of Russia and Western Europe by road, rail and the Caspian port of Atyrau.
According to the World Bank, Kazakhstan transitioned in less than two decades from lower-middle-income to upper-middle-income status. Since 2002, Kazakhstan’s GDP per capita has risen six-fold and poverty has fallen sharply, significantly improving the country’s ranking in the World Bank’s indicator of shared prosperity. Kazakhstan was also the first former Soviet Republic to repay all of its debt to the International Monetary Fund following Independence, seven years ahead of schedule. It ranked third, after China and Qatar, in the World Bank’s list of the twenty five most dynamic economies of the 21st century’s first decade.
WorldPR has worked for multiple Kazakhstan government departments and agencies since 2004, and advised key private-sector actors in the country’s mineral resources sector. It’s principal mission has been to communicate Kazakhstan’s successes to international audiences, raise the country’s profile and cement its position on the world stage. It has advised the government in a wide range of policies and initiatives, including Kazakhstan’s chairmanship of the OSCE in 2010, its successful application to join the WTO in 2015 and its membership of the United Nations Security Council in 2017. In recent years WorldPR has assisted international efforts by the Kazakhstan government to secure the prosecution and trial of Mukhtar Ablyazov, the criminal mastermind who absconded from Kazakhstan in 2009 with an estimated $7 billion.
Kazakhstan’s founding father, Nursultan Nazarbayev, stood down as president in 2019. Astana, the nation’s capital city that he founded after Independence, was renamed Nursultan in his honour.