Astana, November 17, 2025 — Kazakhstan’s competition regime has undergone sweeping reforms over the past decade, but significant structural and operational gaps continue to hinder effective enforcement, according to the OECD’s 2025 Peer Review.
The assessment finds that Kazakhstan has modernised parts of its framework through five successive “antimonopoly packages” and by re-establishing the Agency for the Protection and Development of Competition (AZRK) as an independent authority. However, the OECD warns that the Agency’s broad mandate — spanning privatisation, procurement, and price monitoring — risks pulling it away from core enforcement functions.
Key Findings
The Peer Review highlights several weaknesses that undermine predictability and legal certainty for businesses, including an overly fragmented legal framework and reliance on preventive soft-law tools rather than robust investigations. Limited use of the leniency programme, procedural rigidity in market studies, and insufficient judicial specialisation further constrain effective enforcement.
Kazakhstan’s economy remains marked by deep state involvement and widespread price regulation. State-owned enterprises and “single operators” continue to hold extensive market privileges, and the OECD notes that competitive neutrality is still poorly understood and inconsistently applied. Reforms such as the Yellow Pages Rule and the newly created Privatisation Office have yet to produce measurable improvements.
The OECD also finds that while AZRK participates actively in regional and international fora, domestic engagement with businesses, civil society, and the judiciary remains insufficient. A more structured advocacy strategy is needed to strengthen competition culture and build support for reforms.
Key Recommendations
The OECD sets out a broad agenda to strengthen Kazakhstan’s regime, including:
- Refocusing AZRK’s resources on enforcement and improving internal structures, digital capacity, and economic expertise.
- Enhancing antitrust enforcement quality, including more rigorous economic analysis, a shift away from structural presumptions, and replacing ex-post merger notifications with risk-based, ex-ante review.
- Promoting competitive neutrality, restricting the formation of single operators, and applying equivalent rules to private and state-owned firms.
- Improving transparency and legal certainty, including publishing guidelines and updating methodologies.
- Strengthening advocacy, particularly to sectoral regulators and local authorities, to embed competition policy across government.
The OECD concludes that implementing these measures would support Kazakhstan’s long-term economic diversification, improve the independence and effectiveness of its enforcement regime, and align its system more closely with international standards.
