Kazakhstan to develop new investment instruments
Kazakhstan needs serious transformations and reforms aimed at increasing investment attractiveness, ensuring transparency and predictability of the state policies. This was announced by President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev during a working meeting of the Council of Foreign Investors, the Akorda press service reported.
To achieve these goals, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev put forward a set of proposals and initiatives. The Head of State outlined the creation of new investment instruments as the first task. In accordance with his instructions, the mechanism of the Strategic Investment Agreement has already been developed for this purpose in order to ensure guaranteed stability of legislative conditions on the part of the state for the entire period of validity.
Kassym-Jomart Tokayev turned his attention to the need to improve the business climate in the country. The Government is going to prepare a qualitatively new regulatory system. All control and supervisory, permitting and other regulatory instruments will be analyzed. Additionally, the Head of State highlighted that this year they had strengthened the protection of investors from corruption pressure. Anti-corruption support of the Anti-Corruption Agency covers over 500 business projects totaling more than KZT12 trillion.
The President also focused on the issue of ecology, informing the foreign participants of the meeting about the development of a new Environmental Code, prepared on the basis of the advanced approaches of the OECD member countries. “Enterprises that have implemented these technologies will be free from emission fees. I would like to note every country has such a mechanism, when the state shares environmental costs with enterprises. In fact, this is a large-scale public-private partnership project. We deliberately chose this approach. We expect that business will fully fulfill its part of the agreements,” said Kassym-Jomart Tokayev.
The Head of State also highlighted the possibilities of the IT sector, which, due to the negative consequences of the pandemic, has really boosted the accelerated development of the digital economy. According to him, the development of the domestic IT industry, where Kazakhstan plans to attract almost KZT500 billion during 5 years, requires serious support from global technology companies.
“Today, about 6% of the world's mining is concentrated in Kazakhstan. In addition, the development of the IT market, engineering and other high-tech services opens up serious opportunities for export. We intend to attract investments from major global players in the field of cloud computing and platforms. Preparatory works are underway to construct four mega data-processing centers - in Nur-Sultan, Almaty, Shymkent and Atyrau. These are colossal processing power to be located on a large international information highway,” the Head of State said.
Kassym-Jomart Tokayev stressed the importance of developing the domestic pharmaceutical industry. The President said that by 2025 Kazakhstan expects to increase the share of its own pharmaceutical production in the country to 50%. In addition, the production of medical equipment and supplies will be actively developed. These sectors are open for investment, and such projects, as it was announced, will receive full support from the state.