Borderless Bazaars and Regional Integration in Central Asia

Borderless Bazaars and Regional Integration in Central Asia

Author: Bartlomiej Kaminski

Publisher: World Bank Publications

Published: 2012-06-05

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 082139472X

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Bazaars in Central Asia play a major role in regional and national chains of production and distribution. This type of cross-border trade benefits particularly the poor, by keeping prices low and creating jobs also for women.


Borderless Bazaars and Regional Integration in Central Asia

Borderless Bazaars and Regional Integration in Central Asia

Author: Bartlomiej Kaminski

Publisher: World Bank Publications

Published: 2012-06-08

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 0821394711

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Trade that straddles borders in Central Asia plays a vital role in the livelihoods of border communities and buttresses prosperity in often poor regions. By strengthening commercial ties, cultural understanding and deepening community relationships, border trade nurtures amicable relations between neighboring countries. This book examines the characteristics of trade intermediated by a network of bazaars in Central Asia and its significance for local economies. It uncovers the dynamic phenomenon of bazaars in propelling trade. Bazaars were invented in central Asia centuries ago; in their modern form, as highly flexible and low cost centers for trade, endowed with modern sophisticated logistics, bazaars provide a channel parallel to that of formal trade. Bazaars play major roles in regional and national chains of production and distribution with national networks strongly integrated and overlapping across Central Asian economies. They are the major agents for border trade, which fights poverty by cheapening products and by creating employment opportunities, especially for women. The book examines the public policy implications of bazaar or non-standard trade and actions that could be taken to foster such trade. A light regulatory touch and a low fiscal burden would help fight poverty. Improvements in the business climate and elimination of harassment of traders by local officials as well as easing conditions for the movement of peoples and vehicles would be hugely beneficial. But this book goes beyond trade. It considers the potential for border community cooperation in a variety of activities, public services, and shared infrastructure, culture that could yield rich dividends and make meaningless borders as separators of human activities. It examines the example of border cooperation in Europe through Euroregios as a model for Central Asia. Finally, the book concludes with a series of recommendations for public authorities intended to deepen border trade and cooperation.


Different Approaches on Central Asia

Different Approaches on Central Asia

Author: Sahibzada Muhammad Usman

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2023-04-04

Total Pages: 159

ISBN-13: 1666913014

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This book explains Central Asia's different perceptive, especially in the economic, security, and energy fields. The book also clarifies the influence of America, Russia, Europe, and China on Central Asian countries. Central Asia and international players' current association depends on geographic, political, economic, and security factors. Central Asia sits at the center of the Asian continent, a region rich in history and culture. This region benefits from a mixture of national identities that have been developed carefully for many decades. Central Asia consists of five former Soviet nations, as it is currently defined: Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan. This book discusses several issues involves in Central Asia.


Informal Markets and Trade in Central Asia and the Caucasus

Informal Markets and Trade in Central Asia and the Caucasus

Author: Susanne Fehlings

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-04-11

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 1000594025

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This edited book introduces new research on informal markets and trade in Central Asia and the Caucasus. The research presented in this volume is based on recent field research in Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, as well as Beijing, Guangzhou, Yiwu and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China. The nine chapters in this book illustrate how informal markets and trade in Central Asia and the Caucasus have provided space for millions of people across the region to negotiate changes in state and society in the three decades since the breakup of the Soviet Union and the emergence of successor states. Collectively, the book suggests that informality should be seen as a normative order for polities in Central Asia and the Caucasus for three reasons: (1) The inability – or unwillingness – of the states to measure commercial transactions. (2) The highly personalized nature of small business operations that rest on networking and social relations, oral agreements and trust. (3) Markets and bazaars being embedded within states in which clientelism frequently thrives. This book is a significant new contribution to the study of trade and informal markets in Central Asia and the Caucasus, and will be a great resource for academics, researchers and advanced students of Sociology, History, Politics, Business, Economics, Social Anthropology and Geography. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Central Asian Survey.


Beyond Energy

Beyond Energy

Author: Jacopo Maria Pepe

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-11-22

Total Pages: 506

ISBN-13: 3658201924

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Jacopo Maria Pepe examines the rapid development of non-energy transport infrastructure in the broader Eurasian space. By doing so, the author considers the ongoing structural transformation of the Eurasian continent against the backdrop of deepening commercial interconnectivity in Eurasia into broader areas of trade, supported by the rapid development of rail connectivity. He frames this process in a long-wave historical analysis and considers in detail the geopolitical, geo-economic, and theoretical implications of deepening physical connectivity for the relationships among China, Russia, Central Asia, and the European Union.


The Central Asian Economies in the Twenty-First Century

The Central Asian Economies in the Twenty-First Century

Author: Richard Pomfret

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2019-01-15

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 0691182213

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4.5. The 2007-8 Banking Crisis, Resource Nationalism, and Samruk-Kazyna -- 4.6. Kazakhstan 2050 -- 4.7. Conclusions -- 5. Uzbekistan -- 5.1. The Uzbek Paradox, 1991-96 -- 5.2. The Reintroduction of Exchange Controls, 1996-2003 -- 5.3. Economic Reform and Social Unrest -- 5.4. Responding to Crisis and Facing New Challenges in 2014-16 -- 5.5. The Karimov Era in Retrospect -- 5.6. Prospects for the Mirziyoyev Era -- 6. Turkmenistan -- 6.1. The Turkmenistan Economic Model -- 6.2. External Relations -- 6.3. Economic Performance, 1991-2006 -- 6.4. Natural Gas: Part One -- 6.5. From Turkmenbashi to Berdymuhamedov -- 6.6. Natural Gas: Part Two -- 6.7. Conclusions -- 7. The Kyrgyz Republic -- 7.1. Creating a Market Economy -- 7.2. Economic Development -- 7.3. Kumtor -- 7.4. Transit Center Manas -- 7.5. Retail Trade and Value Chains -- 7.6. Migration and Remittances -- 7.7. Economic and Political Developments in 2010 and After -- 7.8. Conclusions -- 8. Tajikistan


Sustainable Land Management in Greater Central Asia

Sustainable Land Management in Greater Central Asia

Author: Victor R. Squires

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-22

Total Pages: 493

ISBN-13: 1317394046

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Greater Central Asia encompasses a vast area that includes deserts, natural grasslands, steppes, shrublands and alpine regions. Many of these land types are degraded and productivity is falling at a time when human populations and livestock inventories are on the rise. Ecosystem stability and biodiversity are under threat and there is an urgent need to develop more sustainable land management regimes. This book uses an integrated regional approach to provide a comprehensive exploration of sustainable land development in Central Asia. An interdisciplinary team of experts analyses the economic, ecological, sociological, technological and political factors surrounding sustainable land and water management in the region, sharing potential problems and solutions. As international concern about desertification grows, the book concludes by asking how the region is likely to develop in the future. This book will be of value to scholars, students, policy makers and NGOs with an interest in sustainable development in Central Asia.


Order at the Bazaar

Order at the Bazaar

Author: Regine A. Spector

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2017-08-15

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 1501712381

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Order at the Bazaar delves into the role of bazaars in the political economy and development of Central Asia. Bazaars are the economic bedrock for many throughout the region—they are the entrepreneurial hubs of Central Asia. However, they are often regarded as mafia-governed environments that are largely populated by the dispossessed. By immersing herself in the bazaars of Kyrgyzstan, Regine A. Spector learned that some are rather best characterized as islands of order in a chaotic national context. Spector draws on interviews, archival sources, and participant observation to show how traders, landowners, and municipal officials create order in the absence of a coherent government apparatus and bureaucratic state. Merchants have adapted Soviet institutions, including trade unions, and pre-Soviet practices, such as using village elders as the arbiters of disputes, to the urban bazaar by building and asserting their own authority. Spector’s findings have relevance beyond the bazaars and borders of one small country; they teach us how economic development operates when the rule of law is weak.


Incomplete State-Building in Central Asia

Incomplete State-Building in Central Asia

Author: Viktoria Akchurina

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-10-19

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 3031141822

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This book is about transformation of the state and an incomplete state-building. It defies the transitology assumption of continuity, linearity and dichotomy of formal and informal in the transformation of the state. Contrary to the conventional approaches, it claims that any social order or its political scaffolding, the state, is always incomplete and we need to develop cognitive maps to better understand that incompleteness. It reflects on the social practices, processes and patterns that evolve as a non-linear result of three sets of factors: those that are historical, external, and elite-driven. Three Central Asian states - Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan - are examined here comparatively as case studies, as Central Asia represents an interesting terrain to challenge conventional understanding of the state. Specifically, the book captures a paradox at hand: how come three states, which made different political, economic, cultural, and social choices at the outset of their independence in the 1990s, have ended up as so-called “weak states” in the 2000s and onwards? This puzzle can be better understood through looking at the relationship among three main sets of factors that shape state-building processes, such as history, external actors, and local elites. This book applies an interdisciplinary approach, combining political anthropology, political economy, sociology, and political science. It helps conceptualize and understand social and political order beyond the “failed state” paradigm


Authoritarian Regionalism in the World of International Organizations

Authoritarian Regionalism in the World of International Organizations

Author: Anastassia V. Obydenkova

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-05-02

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 0192575724

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The interconnection between international organizations (IOs) membership and democratization has become a topic of intense debate. However, the main focus of the literature so far has been on IOs created by democratic states and comprised mostly of democracies, for examples the European Union. In contrast to existing studies, this book focuses on another group of regional IOs, referred to as 'non-democratic IOs' which are organizations founded by autocracies. How do these newly emerged organizations interrelate and interact with the outside world? How do they counteract and confront the danger of democratization in their own member states and neighboring states? This book aims to address these questions by developing a new theory of authoritarian regionalism, and by combining both quantitative and qualitative analysis to test it. The quantitative analysis uses a large dataset of all regional organizations worldwide for the post-World War II period, with the aim of defining historical trends in development and the modification of regionalism over the last seven decades (1945-2015). Qualitative analysis refines and develops the argument by looking at the case of post-Soviet Eurasia. The book uncovers a new type of regionalism - 'authoritarian regionalism' and traces its historical roots as well as its implications for modern politics. The book is the first attempt to systematically investigate the functioning and the impact of authoritarian regionalism as a new phenomenon as well as its implications for democratization world-wide. The book contributes to the theory of regionalism, international organizations, studies of autocracies, foreign policy, and democratization world-wide.