S-Choir

I scooped up the latest Esquire magazine at Philly International. Of course I killed it before I arrived at my first stop in 8 Mile Detroit. There was an article about number 18 KZ in the rag's list of 100 best things. The article gives an American bias, but paints an accurate picture in some spots. Many residents of Kazakhstan believe that Americans are only interested in thier oil and the windfall of income around the petro biz. The article is below, read on:

Esquire 100
No. 18: Kazakhstan, a Country to Watch
Smart people think there's money to be made there. And not just because of that movie.

It has a few kinks to work out, of course. Corruption, an unsettling concentration of political power, and wine that is made from fermented horse urine. Wait, that last part is from Borat. And isn't that the problem? You, for one, wouldn't know anything at all about Kazakhstan if not for Borat (which wasn't about Kazakhstan at all). In fact, Borat is probably the only reason you're reading this. But now that you're here, there's something else you should know:
A friend of mine is moving to Kazakhstan this month. He's barely thirty, and he and his new young wife will live there for two years. He works for a huge investment bank, and the people who run the huge investment bank believe that Kazakhstan is the future. So they're sending my friend there to open a new office.

The bank's reasons for this have nothing to do with Borat. At least, that's not what gave my friend's employer -- and quite a few other companies, including Deutsche Bank, ExxonMobil, Ernst & Young, Mitsubishi, and ABN AMRO Bank -- the idea of setting up shop there. Rather, it's because of the rapidly growing economy, the improved business climate for foreigners, the low taxes -- and the oil. A lot of it, discovered in 2000, gurgling deep beneath the Caspian Sea. When they start pumping the Kashagan oil field in 2011, Kazakhstan's oil production is set to double. By 2015, the country could have reserves of 110 billion barrels, catapulting it into the top five oil-producing countries in the world.

Kazakhstan!

My friend will not be drilling oil, of course. The urgency in shipping him over there has more to do with the rapid, recent spread of wealth to sectors other than energy, and the resulting positive effects on the business climate. Kazakhstan recently made a huge jump on the World Bank's ranking of countries by how easy it is to do business there -- from number eighty-two in 2005 to number sixty-three last year. According to a recent Financial Times report, a slew of local banks and industrial companies have joined energy and mining companies in seeking IPOs, primarily on the London exchange, raising foreign capital and their international profiles at the same time. The same report says Kazakhstan's banking system is already more advanced than Russia's.

The government's business-friendly efforts, coupled with an average economic growth rate of 9 percent a year, budget surpluses topping 6 percent a year, and increased public spending, are going to make a lot of people rich. Sacha Baron Cohen rich. And there's no denying that, in a weird way, Borat has given the country star appeal, dragging the ninth largest nation in the world onto the international stage.

There are still those other problems, naturally. Nursultan Nazarbayev, the unpredictable sixty-seven-year-old president of Kazakhstan, manages to be both authoritarian and progressive, myopic and wildly optimistic. He has been the president for as long as Kazakhstan has been a country -- since 1991 -- and, thanks to new reforms he recently finessed through parliament, he'll run for president for as long as he likes.

Nazarbayev's big, weird project lately has been moving the capital from Almaty, a city on the southern border near China and Kyrgyzstan, to Astana, a made-up city in the middle of nowhere. Astana, which literally translates to "capital," lies in the steppes, up north near Russia. Speculation about the president's motives range from his desire to create a capital free of dreary Communist baggage to his supposed belief that Astana is easier for foreigners to pronounce than Almaty.

Besides Nazarbayev's sometimes eccentric behavior, his government also has a record of disregard for contract law, insurance regulation, and, from time to time, human rights -- things like that. (And then there's his countrymen's widespread taste for fermented horse milk.)

Still, in his most recent yearly address to parliament, Nazarbayev reaffirmed his grand plan: to make Kazakhstan one of "the world's fifty most competitive countries" by 2030. He and everyone else in the nation seem to be announcing that Kazakhstan is ready to play -- which puts pressure on my friend. "A lot of pressure," he said over the last all-beef burger he's likely to have in a while.