Building States and Markets: Enterprise Development in Central Asia

This book examines the emerging entrepreneurial middle class and their relationship with the state and market building in post-Soviet Central Asia. A new entrepreneurial class occupies a central position of balance between the growing poor and disfranchised population and an increasingly unaccountable bureaucratic regime entangled with business groups and oligarchs in state-society relationships. Studying the patterns of enterprise development and entrepreneurship in relation to emerging autocratic and oligarchic control built into states and markets deserves much attention. Although new business owners form a heterogeneous group showing diverse regional, ethnic and social characteristics, these entrepreneurs of Central Asia provide the single most important source of social stability and cohesion in the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union. This study provides a range of analysis looking at enterprise development and entrepreneurship within national, regional and sectoral contexts with rich empirical data collected from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.