Central Asia Policy Brief No. 27, June 2015
By Luca Anceschi
Is Turkmenistan slowly entering an unprecedented export crisis? Recently, the regime’s key diversification failure—namely that affecting the country’s production structure, which remained unchanged throughout the post-Soviet years—has been compounded by an unexpected yet not unpredictable reduction of Turkmenistan’s export options. Exporting gas—Turkmenistan’s main source of revenue—might soon become a more challenging undertaking. This short piece intends to contextualise Turkmenistan’s export conundrum by questioning whether the TAPI pipeline can ultimately be seen as an adequate answer to the medium-term export crisis faced by the regime headed by Gurbanguly Berdymuhamedov.
