Kazakhstan capital may be moved back to Almaty by 2020: Marat Shibutov

The capital of Kazakhstan may be moved back to Almaty by 2020, Tengrinews.kz reports citing chairman of the Association of Near-Border Cooperation Marat Shibutov during a club discussion at the Institute of Political Solutions called Looking into the future: Kazakhstan-2020 on the geopolitical and geo-economic world map. “I think that our economy will not embrace Astana and the capital will be moved back. I am also sure that the UN forecast is quite correct and we can face stagnation of the population, 17-18 million,” Shibutov said during the meeting, explaining the general tendencies. According to Shibutov, the current budget of the capital is 1.5 times larger that the budget of the whole South-Kazakhstan oblast. Whereas there are much more people living in South-Kazakhstan oblast. In his view, investment of such huge amounts of money into Astana is not feasible. The representative of Association of Near-Border Cooperation pointed out that there had been a decrease in investments into oil and gas sector and an increase of investments into nuclear sector. Separatism movements becoming more pronounced, mass land replotting becoming more widespread and degradation of the population taking place because of the government's inability to maintain high education level were among other trends that he mentioned when sharing his vision of the country's development till 2020.