The Kazakh Geo-Economy: Import Dependence on Russia Above All Else

A little background on the global structures of Kazakhstan's geoeconomic insertedness. I don't quite have any elaborate theory about all this, but there is at least one definitely interesting pattern. We might call it a pattern of import dependence.

Like with all countries in the world, the structure of Kazakhstan's foreign trade is, clearly, asymmetrical. What is interesting to me is 1 the magnitude and 2 the pattern of that asymmetry. 

Below you will find Kazakhstan's top 10 export- and top 10 import-partners (altogether 13 data countries, each represented by a dot), based on data from the World Bank's WITS data bank. The blue line is where a dot would be if trade with the country represented by the dot were perfectly balanced from a Kazakh geoeconomic perspective, i.e., if exports and imports with said country amounted to exactly the same percentage of Kazakhstan's total exports and imports. The farther a dot is from that blue line, the greater of the likely domestic structural impact of that relationship (called dependency).

To me, this shows a couple of small facts and one big-ish observation. The smaller facts: 

•  The Netherlands, France, Switzerland and Spain are the countries where the Kazakh economy "makes money," i.e., it sells Kazakh goods but purchases considerably less. Overall, the magnitude of these differences is not particularly great, e.g., Kazakh exports to the Netherlands are 7,6% of Kazakhstan's exports while Dutch imports are only 0,6% of Kazakh imports, and that--7,6% vs. 0,6%--is the greatest discrepancy underneath the blue line.
• Conversely, the US, Germany, Belarus and China have the opposite pattern in their trade with Kazakhstan: Imports from them constitute a greater part of Kazakhstan's imports than their Kazakh exports.
• Kazakh trade with Italy--8,9% of imports and 9,7% of exports--and South Korea--4,1% and 5,3%, respectively--is as close to being balanced as it gets.

And, now, the Big Bear of an observation. The Russian Federation has a very peculiar pattern in its trade with Kazakhstan, one that looks like a grossly exaggerated version of the second type I described in the previous paragraph. Russia--all alone in the top-left quadrant of the graph, in a league of its own--absorbs just under 10% of Kazakh exports while its products constitute 36,7% of Kazakh imports. Kazakhstan has a remarkably un-balanced trade pattern with Russia. Mind you, that is not exactly unprecedented in the post-world-war-II world; in fact that is quite reminiscent of post-independence relations between erstwhile colonized, now independent states and their former colonial powers. Russia-Kazakhstan trade involves a large-ish flow of Kazakh exports to Russia (with 9,7%, Russia is tied with Italy on second-third place among Kazakhstan's top export partners), dwarfed by the glacier of Russian exports to Kazakhstan (constituting more than one-third of Kazakh imports, 36,7% to be precise).  

By itself that says nothing about what is exported from Russia to Kazakhstan--my guess is mainly machinery, putting Kazakhstan squarely in the post-Soviet Russian technological orbit (indexing technological dependence as well), but just the sheer magnitude of it indicates that the Kazak economy labors under very strong import dependence on Russia. To put it simply, the Kazakh economy produces to sell its commodities to its four top export destinations (Russia, the PRC, Italy and South Korea) just to produce enough revenue to be able to pay for what it imports from Russia.  Kazakh imports from Russia and China exceed more than half of Kazakh imports. I would also be very surprised if import dependence were not also tied to financial dependence.

Finally, there is the interesting question of import- vs. export-dependence. There is an interesting regularity there as well. 

The magnitude of a country's dependence on another is by asking 'how much more important a particular network connection (export or import linkage) is for country A than the same is for country B?' I computed this, for comparison's sake, for Belarus, another country in the post-Soviet integration system called Commonwealth of Independent States expected to be highly dependent on its trade with Russia. Here are the results for 2019, computed, again, from the World Bank's WITS database.

To put this in words, Belarus' dependence on Russia is observed in both exports and imports. The same trade links are 7,48 and 10,76 times more significant for Belarus than for Russia.  Kazakhstan is also somewhat dependent on Russia as an export market (Kazakhstan-to-Russia exports are only 4,20 time more significant for the former than the latter). But, importantly, Russia-to-Kazakhstan trade is 11,17 times more important for Kazakhstan than for Russia. In other words, Kazakhstan has a very considerably higher import dependence on Russia (and that is greater even than in the case of smaller Belarus) than on exports. Put differently, it seems the Kazakh economy has considerably less of an issue of dependence on Russia in terms of its exports than imports. In contrast, Belarus' external linkages are more evenly spread out, it has arguably strong dependence on Russia in both dimensions.