Last week, the World Economic Forum (WEF) issued annual report on “Global Competitiveness Indexes”. Reminder: on March 1, president Nazarbayev proclaimed “Strategy of Kazakhstan’s entry to 50 most competitive countries of the world”. The report was neglected by Kazakhstan’s official and semi-official media, although the WEF ratings are the main guideline in estimation of competitiveness.

Probably the reason is that the strategy’s first anniversary is marked by Kazakhstan going down on 5 points in the WEF rating.

Experts say that this is the result of populism and “imitation of tremendous activity” in absence of real steps toward improvement of investment climate, rise of the level of human development and modernization of infrastructure. Further “polishing” of macroeconomic indexes and increase of oil extraction may ensure the place in “top 50″ (if another “nervous breakdown” shakes the world oil markets), but as the oil price will go down the rating will shrink too.

Ambitious Kazakhstan is covered in the report by only one sentence, saying that “leader among the Central Asian economies has good macroeconomic performance due to the growth of the oil and gas incomes”. However, leadership in the region cannot be considered as any success, taking into account huge gap between staring (”Soviet”) potential of Kazakhstan and its neighbors, not to mention mineral resources.

The figures are also quite discouraging. WEF divides the countries on three categories: (1) those still meeting the basic factors of competitiveness, (2) those trying to increase their efficiency and (3) innovative economies. Owing to petrodollar-fed GDP, Kazakhstan is in the second group.

At the same time, Kazakhstan has very poor performance on three out of four basic requirements (except notorious macroeconomics). It is behind Vietnam on the level of institutions, lags behind Pakistan on infrastructure development and is inferior to Tajikistan in public health and primary education!