Trade Policy in a ‘Double-Landlocked’ Transition Economy: Kyrgyzstan

Prema-chandra Athukorala and Hal Hill

Departmental Working Papers from The Australian National University, Arndt-Corden Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper examines trade and commercial policy in Kyrgyzstan in the context of that country’s distinctive historical and geographical characteristics, drawing on the World Trade Organisation’s latest Trade Policy Review. A former Soviet republic, it is a geographically isolated, effectively a ‘double-landlocked’, transition economy. The country was an early liberalizer, both economically and politically, among the former Soviet republics, and it is now a broadly open economy. After a catastrophic economic decline in the immediate transition era it also achieved macroeconomic stabilization relatively quickly. However the growth dividend from these major policy reforms has been modest, and the country has become one of the most remittance-dependent economies in the world. While its geographical handicaps are immutable, we argue that key explanations for the slow economic growth are the limited ‘behind-the-border’ reforms, the dualistic economic structure, and misdirected fiscal allocations. We also draw out some of the broader implications for trade policy reform in other transition economies.

Keywords: Kyrgyzstan; landlocked; transition economy; behind-the-border reform (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F13 O53 P27 P33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cis, nep-int and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://crawford.anu.edu.au/sites/default/files/20 ... ala_hill_2023_02.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Trade policy in a ‘double‐landlocked’ transition economy: Kyrgyzstan (2023)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pas:papers:2023-02

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Departmental Working Papers from The Australian National University, Arndt-Corden Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Prema-chandra Athukorala ().