Last week’s story was the end of the Iran war and the fading of the wartime premium that had briefly made Central Asia’s oil and its non-Gulf routes look indispensable. This week the region answers with two finance forums, the Tashkent International Investment Forum and the IsDB meetings in Baku. Both sell the same thing, resilience and regional integration, to investors who have just watched an oil price spike and collapse.
The two hosts are also rivals. Uzbekistan is launching a common-law financial center to pull in Gulf and global capital, an echo of Kazakhstan’s AIFC in Astana. Azerbaijan is using the IsDB platform to position Baku as the Caspian’s finance and connectivity hub. Each wants to be the place capital lands first.
Crisis-driven significance is borrowed. Forum-driven capital has to be earned.
What is genuinely new is the Regional Alliance of Investment Councils of Central Asia and the Caucasus, launched in Tashkent on 16 June with eight founding members across both regions. On paper it stitches Central Asia and the South Caucasus into a single investment space, the same geography as the Middle Corridor. Whether it grows into more than a memorandum is the open question.
The harder point follows from last week. Crisis-driven significance is borrowed, and it arrives without the region doing anything. Forum-driven capital has to be earned, and it will come only if the reforms, the ratings, the legal regimes and the corridors hold up under normal conditions. The signing totals this week will be large, as they always are. The share that turns into built projects a year from now, more than the size of the headlines, will say whether the pitch outlived the war that lent the region its relevance.