Kazakhstan is located in Central Asia and is the 10th largest country in the world. It occupies more land than Western Europe, and is the business center of 56 million Central Asians. It is immensely rich in natural resources particularly oil & gas. In 2008 in Kazakhstan was extracted 72 million tons of oil. By 2010 is planned to increase oil extraction to 100 million tons a year, and by 2015 — to 150 million tons a year in consequence Kazakhstan will be included into ten the largest oil-extracting countries of the world.
Due to its vast oil resources and liberal economic policies, since 2000, the Kazakhstan economy has been growing at more than 9% per year, which means that it has been growing faster than Russia and has been the fastest growing economy in the CIS for the last 5 years.
In addition, the local currency has been stable for more than five years, inflation is less than 7%, unemployment is about 8%, government tax revenues are increasing, gold and foreign exchange reserves are almost US$ 9 billion and the new National Fund established to handle the surplus oil tax revenues has a current balance in excess of US$3 billion. Foreign trade for 2006 is estimated to continue to grow at an annual rate of about 20% with imports projected to grow to US$13 billion/year and exports to US$ 22 billion/year.
Kazakhstan is a member of the five-country Eurasia Economic Community, along with Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and together with Russia has applied for WTO membership which it hopes to achieve in 2012.
