Economy
Business and investment
Central Asia agrees to meter the Syr Darya
The Interstate Commission for Water Coordination approved the development of a plan for automated water accounting across the Syr Darya basin at its 94th session in Turkestan, the Chronicles of Turkmenistan reported on Monday, citing Report.az.
Tashkent’s IT zone gets English law until 2100
Uzbekistan’s Senate approved the constitutional law on Enterprise Uzbekistan, an international digital-technologies centre in Tashkent with a special jurisdiction built on elements of English law and a lifespan written to the year 2100.
Turkmenistan halves the fuel a departing car may carry
From today a vehicle leaving the country carries 150 duty-free litres, down from 300, and every litre above that costs half again as much.
KazMunayGas calls the $80 billion Kashagan report unreliable
The company’s chairman read the story and does not confirm it. Kursiv, which carried the report on Friday, now traces it to Bloomberg.
Wildberries starts insuring sellers' goods against drone strikes
The marketplace has extended its seller insurance to damage or loss from terrorist acts, sabotage and drone attacks, covering delivery, pickup points and returns. Premiums have gone up with the cover, to between 1.96% and 5.6% of the value of the goods.
Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan clear 19 product groups of barriers from Monday
Tariff and non-tariff barriers come off 19 categories of trade between the two countries on 10 August, from cotton fibre and grain to construction materials and machinery. Two-way trade ran about $5 billion in 2025 and grew 38% in the first five months of this year.
Fewer workers go to Russia, and the rubles they send buy less
Work-purpose entries to Russia from the region’s three biggest sending countries fell 15% in the first half of the year. From 1 September the workers who remain in Moscow will be registered through a phone app, and the ruble they are paid in has lost nearly 12% of its som value in five weeks.
Uzbekistan's prices fell in July, and its petrol rose 21.7% in a year
Consumer prices in Uzbekistan fell 0.1% in July as the vegetable season arrived. Petrol rose 4.8% in the month and 21.7% over the year.
Solar and wind take $376 million of the Kyrgyz-Russian list
Participants at the eighth Kyrgyz-Russian economic forum at Bosteri on Lake Issyk-Kul signed projects whose sector totals come to $545.1 million, with two renewable plants accounting for $376 million of that. The head of the Russian-Kyrgyz Development Fund put the value of all documents signed, trade contracts and inter-regional agreements included, above $800 million.
Recovered assets flow into village water for a second day
For the second morning in a row, Kazakhstan's government has taken money from its recovered-assets fund and pointed it at rural water: 2.7 billion tenge (about $5.7 million) on Thursday, after 5 billion tenge (about $10.6 million) on Wednesday.
India calls an Uzbek trade pact a promising idea
India’s commerce and industry minister Piyush Goyal offered Tashkent the vocabulary of interest at a business forum in New Delhi: a free trade agreement is an idea the two governments could examine.
The Caspian data cable finishes its seabed leg
Kazakhtelecom and its Azerbaijani partner have finished laying fibre across the Caspian floor between Aktau and Sumgait, the hardest stretch of a line due to complete testing this autumn.
All of Tajikistan’s imported wheat now comes from one country
Tajikistan bought 660,800 tonnes of wheat abroad in the first half of 2026, every tonne of it from Kazakhstan, while its own output fell 13.3% to 510,000 tonnes.
Turkmenistan reports growth the IMF cannot find
Ashgabat’s half-year review claims GDP growth of 6.3%. The IMF projects 2.4% for the year and says it builds its own estimates because the official numbers are hard to reconcile with anything else.
The lake the region meets on is losing its ice
Kyrgyzhydromet has measured what the heat is doing. A third of the Issyk-Kul basin’s glacier area is gone against the early catalogues, 23.1% of it in the past 7 to 10 years, and the region’s summits keep convening on the shore of the evidence.
Bektenov turns shelf access into a directive
Kazakhstan’s Tuesday cabinet put first-half manufacturing output at 16 trillion tenge, about $34 billion at Tuesday’s official rate, up 9.8%, and ordered fair access to retail chains for the goods behind the number.
ExxonMobil promises Kazakhstan the long term
Three days after Chevron’s chief executive spoke for the CPC, ExxonMobil’s upstream president sat with the prime minister in Astana and confirmed, in the government’s readout, plans for a long-term presence in Kazakh oil and gas.
Kashagan’s arbitration deadline passes in silence
The end-July date for seating the arbitral panel has passed; no announcement of its composition has surfaced, and the enforcement the arbitration was meant to check keeps running.
A cable starts across the Caspian floor
Laying of the Kazakhstan-Azerbaijan fibre-optic cable began on Friday from Baku toward Aktau, Kazakhstan’s digital development ministry said, with 15 to 20 days of marine work ahead and commissioning promised by the end of the year.
The western workaround acquires statistics at Batumi
Batumi port moved more than 4 million tonnes in the first half of 2026, up 8%, its press service said on 30 July. The port and its oil terminal are run by KazTransOil’s Georgian subsidiary, which makes the figure a Kazakh number as much as a Georgian one.