Can a Giant Science Fair Transform Kazakhstan’s Economy?<br />“If I had intervened, I would have looked undemocratic, right?”<br />Nonetheless, Mr. Nazarbayev has devoted much of his political life to expanding Kazakhstan’s middle class, which has<br />grown from just 9 percent of the population in the mid-2000s to 33 percent in 2014, according to the World Bank.<br />“Ermegiyayev was really a scapegoat to write off the funds<br />that disappeared during the first phase of construction of Expo,” said Ms. Kobalia, a former minister of the economy in Georgia, who quit her job at Expo after little more than a month.<br />The country even displayed a block of “old arctic ice,” which, after watching<br />films of melting floes all over Expo, made you want to yell, “Put it back!”<br />The true ambitions behind Expo will only become apparent after it ends.<br />“This is a country where everything is possible,” veterans of business here like to say, “and everything is impossible.”<br />While tourists traipsed through pavilions, a parallel Expo was unfolding above their heads.
