Despite exhortations from a variety of pundits pitching Kazakhstan as the next big boom market, the fact is that a growing number of analysts are looking at the market and seeing not boom times, but a potential bust.

The credit shortage is beginning to take it’s toll and there is an ever-growing number of properties doing nothing but sitting in an estate agent’s window gathering dust, as it were.

Kazakhstan, like much of the rest of the world is beginning to come to grips with the fact that a major boom is inevitably followed by a slow down or bust at some point. The country’s economic performance over the last decade has been spectacular – 10% GDP growth year on year until 2007, when it slowed to 8.7%, with predictions of a further slowdown to less than 6% in 2008.

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