Crossroads Asia | Economy | Central Asia

A New Dataset Maps Central Asia’s Extractive Economy

An open-access dataset from the Oxus Society maps more than $118 billion in resource exports across the five Central Asian republics, offering a rare quantitative window into the region’s shifting place in Eurasian supply chains.

The Oxus Society for Central Asian Affairs recently released the Central Asia Resource Tracker, a public dataset that maps reserves, production, processing, and export destinations for more than 100 minerals, hydrocarbons, chemicals, industrial materials, and agricultural goods across Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Part of the broader Central Asian Capital & Markets project, the tracker covers more than $118 billion in annual resource exports and follows 33 critical minerals from extraction to destination markets.

Its clearest finding is Kazakhstan’s overwhelming weight in the regional extractive economy. Kazakh oil alone accounts for 40 percent of all exports captured by the tracker, followed by Turkmen gas at 9.2 percent, Uzbek gold at 8.3 percent, Kazakh gold at 7.7 percent, and Kyrgyz gold at 5.3 percent. Hydrocarbons make up just over half of the total, at $61 billion, while critical mineral exports amount to $15.7 billion per year, of which $14 billion come from Kazakhstan, led by copper at $7.3 billion and uranium at $4.2 billion.

The destination data complicates familiar assumptions about the region’s external orientation. The European Union is the largest importer of Central Asian resources as a bloc, taking 29.1 percent of the total tracked exports, while China is the largest single-country importer at roughly one quarter. The United Kingdom and Switzerland each account for around 10 percent, much of it in precious metals. Russia, by contrast, directly absorbs just 1.2 percent of the exports covered by the dataset.

Yet low import volumes should not be mistaken for low leverage. Oxus notes that more than 80 percent of Kazakhstan’s oil still transits through Russian pipelines, giving Moscow outsized influence over a trade flow it does not itself consume in large quantities. In practice, that means the region’s geoeconomic orientation is more diversified than conventional wisdom suggests, even as Soviet-era and Russian-controlled infrastructure continues to shape what can move, where, and at what political cost.

Critical minerals reveal a different hierarchy. China absorbs just under half of Central Asia’s critical mineral exports, Russia roughly one quarter, EU countries 6.4 percent, and the United States 2.1 percent. That imbalance helps explain why Brussels and Washington have stepped up their outreach to the region in recent years. At the first EU-Central Asia summit in Samarkand in April 2025, European leaders announced a 12 billion euro Global Gateway investment package, including 2.5 billion euros dedicated to critical raw materials.

That push is driven not only by industrial policy but........

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