The Underdog of Central Asia

I was doing my daily Worldle (amazing daily geography puzzles, by the way!) and the country of the day was Turkmenistan. One of the best parts of Worldle is not just guessing the country but also guessing the GDP (gross domestic product) of the neighbours and the country itself. Intuition told me Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan are near two much bigger countries, India and China, so maybe there is a lot of outflux of people and they won’t have much GDP.

My best guess for the highest GDP was Uzbekistan, because it has one of the highest cotton productions in the world, grown in the very, very rich Fergana Valley. My next best guess would be Iran, with Afghanistan being the last, Turkmenistan somewhere in the middle and Kazakhstan somewhere at the bottom, assuming most of it would be unoccupied.

But BOY was I surprised. Kazakhstan had the highest GDP per person, and then came Turkmenistan.

Let’s get into it.

Oil, oil, oil

Let’s get the boring answer out of the way first, because it is also the biggest one. Kazakhstan sits on a ridiculous amount of oil. Three giant fields, Tengiz, Kashagan and Karachaganak, do most of the heavy lifting, and in 2024 crude oil alone brought in about $43 billion. That is more than half of everything Kazakhstan sold to the rest of the world that year.

Here’s the part that broke my brain a little. Russia obviously has way more oil than Kazakhstan. But Russia also has about seven times more people. Per person, Kazakhstan actually pumps more oil than Russia does. So the oil money gets split between far fewer people.

And the neighbours? Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have basically no oil or gas at all. Uzbekistan has some gas, but nowhere near enough to carry 37 million people.

Uranium (and basically the whole periodic table)

This one I genuinely did not know. Kazakhstan is the largest uranium producer in the world, and not by a little. In 2024 it mined about 39% of all the uranium on Earth. Most of it is mined by pumping a solution into the ground, dissolving the uranium and pumping it back up, which is a lot cheaper than digging giant pits.

Now, to be fair, uranium is not what makes Kazakhstan rich. It was about $4.6 billion of exports in 2024, which is only around 1.6% of GDP. What it does is make Kazakhstan matter. A huge chunk of the world’s nuclear power plants run on fuel that started in the Kazakh steppe, and most of it heads to China.

And it doesn’t stop at uranium. Copper, zinc, chromium, coal, gold. If it is in the periodic table and you can dig it up, Kazakhstan probably has it.

Letting the world in

Having stuff in the ground is one thing. Getting it out and selling it is another. Right after independence in the 1990s, Kazakhstan invited the big oil companies in. Chevron went into Tengiz, and a whole consortium including ExxonMobil, Shell and Eni went into Kashagan. That meant foreign money and foreign technology from very early on.

Uzbekistan went the other way. It stayed largely closed off until around 2016, when a new president started opening up the economy and freed the currency. Turkmenistan is still one of the most closed countries in the world. Same region, same Soviet starting point, very different choices.

Saving for a rainy day

In 2000, Kazakhstan set up the National Fund, a sovereign wealth fund where a big chunk of the oil money gets parked instead of spent. By the start of 2026 it held around $78 billion, more than a quarter of the country’s GDP. So when oil prices crash, and they do, the whole economy doesn’t fall off a cliff.

So what about the neighbours?

This is where my intuition was half right. I thought people leave Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, and they do, a lot. They just mostly go to Russia, not India or China, and send money back home. In 2024, money sent home from abroad was around 45% of Tajikistan’s entire GDP, the highest share of any country in the world. For Kyrgyzstan it was about 24%, and even Uzbekistan was at 14%. That money keeps families afloat, but it means a lot of the work that powers these economies happens somewhere else.

And my Fergana Valley theory? The valley is genuinely one of the most fertile places in Central Asia, and Uzbekistan really is one of the world’s big cotton producers. But fertile land feeds people, it doesn’t make a country rich the way oil does. Also, plot twist, almost none of the Fergana Valley is in Kazakhstan. It is split between Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, which all sit in the bottom half of the table.

Turkmenistan, the gas giant nobody talks about

Turkmenistan coming in right behind China makes a lot more sense once you know it has some of the largest natural gas reserves on the planet. Depending on who you ask, the country as a whole ranks fourth or fifth in the world for gas reserves. But one single field, Galkynysh, is so big that it is the second-largest gas field anywhere on Earth. Most of that gas goes through a pipeline straight to China.

Why China comes in below Kazakhstan

This was the most surprising row for me, and it turns out it is not even a permanent thing. Kazakhstan and China have been swapping places for decades. In 2013 Kazakhstan was almost twice as rich per person. Then oil prices crashed in 2014 and 2015, Kazakhstan let its currency float, the tenge lost about half its value, and suddenly China was ahead. Kazakhstan only overtook China again in 2023.

The other part is that China is not one economy, it is many. Cities like Beijing and Shanghai are way richer per person than Kazakhstan. But China also has hundreds of millions of people in poorer inland and rural provinces, and when you average over 1.4 billion people, they pull the number down. Kazakhstan has 20 million people and a lot of oil. China has 1.4 billion people and has to import most of its oil. Per person, that math was always going to be close.

So, was I wrong?

Very. Kazakhstan is not empty steppe with nothing happening on it. It is empty steppe sitting on top of oil, uranium and half the periodic table, with few people to share it, a government that let investors in early and a fund that saved the money for when things go bad. Turkmenistan has the gas but keeps the doors shut. And Uzbekistan, my confident pick, has the people, the cotton and the fertile valley, but not the stuff underground that turns into dollars.

Next time Worldle asks me about Central Asia, I’m going straight for Kazakhstan.