As Esbergen reported on the Russian version, President Nazarbayev recently pledged to increase the spending on education and science by factor 25, so that by 2012, Kazakhstan’s science budget would constitute 5% of its GDP. To put these numbers into context, the EU’s goal is to achieve a Research and Development (R&D) share of 3.0% of GDP by 2010.

The increase in Kazakhstan’s R&D spending will have to be accompanied by institutional reforms. Esbergen touches on a variety of issues: The creation of numerous venture funds does not mean that they’ll be easily accessible. The concept of competition in the science sector is relatively new in Kazakhstan - and the system of fixed allocations without the tender process common in the Western world still prevails.

Another related problem to new forms of R&D financing is red tape and corruption, problems that seem to increase proportionately alongside hikes in spending in any public domain. Esbergen also says that due to the collapse of much of the science sector after independence and the subsequent disappearance of a large body of scientists, it is going to be difficult to lure academics and scientists back from the business hemisphere to what they were trained to do.

The promised economic stimuli can only materialise if the connections between business and state-sponsored science are well-functioning and institutionalised. In most European countries, the bulk of R&D takes place in the business sector, e.g. about 66% of all R&D expenditure in Germany is taking place in the corporate world, 75% in Japan. In most oblasts in Kazakhstan, the public share in total R&D expenditure is above 50%.

Naturally, regional disparities also play a big role. USAID, in a May 2006 publication, took us through regional disparities in R&D spending and employment. Nazarbayev’s recent announcement to create five national laboratories with intricate links to business will most probably make the usual suspects the winners - Almaty (with 33% of all higher education institutions already situated here) and Astana, plus maybe one or two other cities (e.g. Ust-Kamenogorsk with comparatively large research) will likely benefit most from the announced R&D spending spree.

This punctual support of excellence is somewhat reminiscent of Germany’s recent campaign to bolster certain higher education institutions in order to create elite universities able to catch up with the US and UK:

Universities in the country’s north and east went largely unacknowledged in the expert panel’s decisions, causing some to predict they could end up as even bigger losers in the future as ever more funding goes to institutions in the south and west, already among the country’s wealthiest regions.