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Erlan Idrisov, the foreign minister of Kazakhstan
I will build my speech on three basic principles. All of them are directed to the future.
Our feelings of what we have done, how we estimate what we have done, and what we plan to do next.
These three pillars form my speech. Of course I will sum up results and make forecasts.
I believe Kazakhstan has established itself as a state.
You know that our launch environment was unique
because we were the most vulnerable in institutional, personnel, and geopolitical spheres.
The huge territory, demographic weakness, a small amount of people,
great dispersion in the population structure, long boundaries, economic underdevelopment,
the weak structure of economy, underdeveloped institutes - all these initial conditions were unfavorable.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, many foreign and our own observers thought that Kazakhstan would fail to establish.
Today we can see that despite these predictions, Kazakhstan has taken a firm line for building its future.
Due to targeted policy which consisted of creating the idea, transforming it into a concept,
choosing the team for its realization, finding financial, economic, and human resources,
developing a scheme of the team work, Kazakhstan established itself as a state.
This stage took all 1990s. We underwent difficulties of ruining the Soviet concept
when we had to exit the ruble zone and so on. You all know it quite well.
As the result we understood that we should develop our own strategic plan.
The strategic plan of development became The Strategy 2030.
It included seven key strategic directions which touched on essential things.
I will remind you these seven directions. First is political sovereignty and all external factors connected with it.
Second is the political reform and establishing a stable society. Third is deep economic reforms.
Fourth is healthy lifestyle, i.e. the social segment, education, health care system, and so on.
Fifth is energy, resources, gaining financial resources for providing a stable movement.
Sixth is our transit potential of logistics development. And the seventh is good government.
These are seven directions which formed The Strategy 2030 by our President in 1997.
It is clear that the strategy wasnt born on one day. The works lasted for several years.
Since the middle of the 1990s the work was hard, young resources of Kazakhstan were involved, young educated people,
and we also relied on foreign experience.
We treated it selectively. We travelled, watched, listened to, and absorbed.
As the result we developed the concept 2030 which is popularly called half-to-nine. It was working for 15 years.
At the moment we estimate ourselves.
The essence of our current situation is that we exist for 20 years under that initial skepticism and relevant euphoria today.
Even foreign observers cannot deny
that our indexes are good in the economic growth, the social growth, the institutional growth, the personnel growth.
They are obvious. Of course we are proud of it, but the government realizes that it is not a reason for wishful thinking.
We are glad to gain certain results, but at the same time we understand that global problems wait for us in the future.
At the moment we are estimating our work. The head of our state proposes a new initiative of the new vision 2050.
Ten minutes to nine. I think people will call it so.
Speaking seriously, we are giving a creative appraisal and analyzing what we have done for 15 years of the strategy.
The first conclusion is that all strategic directions which we chose were right.
Targeted concentration of efforts in all directions was fruitful. We establish statehood in all seven strategic directions.
Independence and statehood. We have registered our boundaries at this period.
For such a geographically big state as Kazakhstan it is a great goal to register boundaries legally.
Moreover, we have great neighbors like China, Russia, the Central Asian states. It is a colossal goal.
The length of our boundaries is more than 400 thousand km.
Considering our human resources, it was difficult to fulfill this task either politically or physically.
We fulfilled the task. We have seriously advanced in the problem of demarcation.
You know that a boundary is either delimitation or demarcation.
The question of independence and political consistency is not acute for Kazakhstan.
As for the economic sphere, look at the indexes of the World Bank, the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development, IMF, and other banks,
independent private ranking agencies "Fitch", "Moodies", and so on.
Everybody says that Kazakhstan has made great strides. We found ourselves in the middle, in the good middle.
From this point of view we did a very good job.
Let's take the health lifestyle segment education, health care system, the social sphere. A lot of work was made here too.
As for our pension reform, it is undergoing lively discussion at the moment, its advantages and drawbacks.
But it is a different question. The fact that discussion is taking place signals that the society is healthy.
Meanwhile, the pension reform is working. Some countries take it as a model.
We, our society discusses it and estimates it after 15 years of the systems working, where minuses and pluses are.
There are different views on pension funds, but the fact is that the reform was established,
it was formed institutionally, and people estimated it differently.
Education was under a special focus of our President. You all know the program Bolashak.
Kazakhstan is unique with this program because huge resources were allocated to the program,
not mentioning other reforms in the educational sphere.
Our whole educational system, especially higher education, was transformed into a competitive system.
Primary school and secondary school are obligatory. There should be no illiterate people in Kazakhstan.
Kazakhstans educational ranking is 99.7%, which is one of highest in the world.
The next sphere is energy. You know that it is our priority.
The indexes need no comments. We tripled oil production during the years of independence.
At the moment we belong to the group of stably exporting states.
Export of our energy sphere is 1.7 million barrels per day it means 70-75 million tons of oil.
Other resources are uranium. We are the leaders of uranium producers in the world.
It was done in the years of independence as well. It is a serious index.
I would like to say that Expo-2017 is our energy theme.
We focused attention at the energy of future on purpose at Expo-2017.
Its essence is to tell the whole world that Kazakhstan is ready for shifting to green economy.
In 10 years Kazakhstan will seriously choose green development,
despite the fact that our coal and other classic resources are huge. We look to the future and hope it will work.
Transport infrastructure is the seventh strategic direction.
We have built thousands and dozens of thousands of automobile roads.
We have extended the net of railways
and complete correcting mistakes in the transport structures which we inherited from the Soviet Union.
We have serious plans for construction of railways.
By 2012 we will finish circling Kazakhstan by railways and by automobile roads.
The heart of these plans is the project West China-West Europe through Russia.
It will be a powerful and great transcontinental project which will be beneficial for China, Kazakhstan, and Russia.