A New Dataset Maps Central Asia’s Extractive Economy |
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 by vulnerability. The EU has already signed critical minerals memoranda with Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and the Samarkand summit elevated that effort to the regional level through a Joint Declaration of Intent on Critical Raw Materials. For Western policymakers, the attraction of Central Asia lies not simply in resource abundance, but in the possibility of building supply chains less exposed to Chinese processing dominance and Russian transit chokepoints.
Tajikistan occupies only a small share of the region’s export earnings, but the tracker suggests it holds disproportionate strategic importance in at least one niche commodity. Oxus estimates that Tajikistan accounts for 20 percent of global antimony production, making it one of the world’s most important suppliers of a metal used in defense, electronics, and industrial applications. The tracker also attributes 12 percent of global antimony reserves to Tajikistan, along with 11.2 percent of global manganese reserves and 7.6 percent of global lead reserves.
The country’s trade geography is striking. According to available trade data reflected in the tracker, Tajik antimony flows overwhelmingly to France and Belgium, with Turkiye taking most of the remainder. That pattern has gained added significance as China tightened export controls on antimony, sharpening concern among Western governments and manufacturers over concentrated supply chains for strategic materials. Even so, Tajikistan remains the smallest exporter in the regional dataset, with just $1.16 billion in total resource exports.
The tracker’s main value is not that it produces entirely new raw data, but that it assembles fragmented public information into a single usable map. Oxus draws on sources including the U.S. Geological Survey, the World Bank’s WITS database, the Observatory of Economic Complexity, OPEC, the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and the International Energy Agency, with export figures drawn from the most recent available year between 2021 and 2025 depending on the commodity. That patchwork imposes limits: the dataset is better read as a regional snapshot than as a time series, and it cannot by itself capture how sanctions, price swings, or border disruptions change trade flows over time.
Still, the political and analytical utility is obvious. Claims like European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s suggestion that a large share of Europe’s future strategic mineral needs could be met by Central Asia become easier to test against transparent, commodity-level data. For journalists, researchers, and investors, the tracker offers something the region has long lacked: a public tool to follow how Central Asia’s oil, gas, gold, uranium, copper, and antimony move through the global economy — and where the real bottlenecks still lie.
Get to the bottom of the story
Subscribe today and join thousands of diplomats, analysts, policy professionals and business readers who rely on The Diplomat for expert Asia-Pacific coverage.
Get unlimited access to in-depth analysis you won't find anywhere else, from South China Sea tensions to ASEAN diplomacy to India-Pakistan relations. More than 5,000 articles a year.
Unlimited articles and expert analysis
Weekly newsletter with exclusive insights
16-year archive of diplomatic coverage
Ad-free reading on all devices
Support independent journalism
Already have an account? Log in.
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 by vulnerability. The EU has already signed critical minerals memoranda with Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and the Samarkand summit elevated that effort to the regional level through a Joint Declaration of Intent on Critical Raw Materials. For Western policymakers, the attraction of Central Asia lies not simply in resource abundance, but in the possibility of building supply chains less exposed to Chinese processing dominance and Russian transit chokepoints.
Tajikistan occupies only a small share of the region’s export earnings, but the tracker suggests it holds disproportionate strategic importance in at least one niche commodity. Oxus estimates that Tajikistan accounts for 20 percent of global antimony production, making it one of the world’s most important suppliers of a metal used in defense, electronics, and industrial applications. The tracker also attributes 12 percent of global antimony reserves to Tajikistan, along with 11.2 percent of global manganese reserves and 7.6 percent of global lead reserves.
The country’s trade geography is striking. According to available trade data reflected in the tracker, Tajik antimony flows overwhelmingly to France and Belgium, with Turkiye taking most of the remainder. That pattern has gained added significance as China tightened export controls on antimony, sharpening concern among Western governments and manufacturers over concentrated supply chains for strategic materials. Even so, Tajikistan remains the smallest exporter in the regional dataset, with just $1.16 billion in total resource exports.
The tracker’s main value is not that it produces entirely new raw data, but that it assembles fragmented public information into a single usable map. Oxus draws on sources including the U.S. Geological Survey, the World Bank’s WITS database, the Observatory of Economic Complexity, OPEC, the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and the International Energy Agency, with export figures drawn from the most recent available year between 2021 and 2025 depending on the commodity. That patchwork imposes limits: the dataset is better read as a regional snapshot than as a time series, and it cannot by itself capture how sanctions, price swings, or border disruptions change trade flows over time.
Still, the political and analytical utility is obvious. Claims like European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s suggestion that a large share of Europe’s future strategic mineral needs could be met by Central Asia become easier to test against transparent, commodity-level data. For journalists, researchers, and investors, the tracker offers something the region has long lacked: a public tool to follow how Central Asia’s oil, gas, gold, uranium, copper, and antimony move through the global economy — and where the real bottlenecks still lie.
Central Asia critical minerals
EU-Central Asia relations
EU-Kazakhstan relations
Kazakhstan-Europe energy supply