A single data point has been circulating among Kazakhstani social media users with the force of a revelation: the average household in Kazakhstan spends a higher share of its income on food than households in Austria — one of the wealthiest countries in the European Union. The comparison, drawn from World Bank and Food and Agriculture Organization household expenditure data, is striking not because it is unfamiliar to economists, but because it cuts through the government's preferred narrative of rising GDP per capita with blunt arithmetic.
According to World Bank data, Kazakhstani households allocate roughly 45 to 50 percent of consumer spending to food, a ratio that places the country alongside middle-income economies across Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Austrian households, by contrast, spend approximately 11 to 12 percent of household income on food, according to Eurostat figures. The gap in absolute wages is equally stark: average monthly wages in Kazakhstan hover around 300,000 tenge — approximately $650 at current exchange rates — compared to Austrian average wages exceeding €3,500 per month.
The arithmetic, in other words, is unambiguous. Kazakhstan's GDP per capita has grown steadily, reaching approximately $13,000 in 2024 in purchasing power parity terms. But PPP figures obscure what matters most to ordinary households: the actual cost of filling a refrigerator.
The Tenge Effect
A significant driver of food unaffordability is currency depreciation. The tenge has lost more than 60 percent of its value against the US dollar since 2014, when Russia's annexation of Crimea and the subsequent oil price collapse sent shockwaves through commodity-dependent Central Asian economies. The National Bank of Kazakhstan has intervened repeatedly to manage volatility, but structural depreciation pressure persists. Because Kazakhstan imports a substantial share of its processed and packaged foods — particularly from Russia, China, and the European Union — import costs have risen sharply in tenge terms even when global food prices have been stable.
Baurzhan Seitkali, an economist at Almaty's KIMEP University who studies Central Asian household economics, notes that the food burden is not uniform. "Urban professionals in Almaty and Astana experience it differently than rural families in the south," he has observed in published research. "But across income quintiles, the share of expenditure on food is dramatically higher than in comparable emerging-market economies that have invested in domestic agricultural productivity."
Land Concentration and Agricultural Dependency
The paradox deepens when one considers that Kazakhstan is a major grain exporter — ranked among the world's top fifteen wheat producers. Yet domestic food prices remain high, a contradiction that economists attribute to several structural factors. Agricultural land concentration is one. A significant portion of arable land remains in the hands of large agribusiness concerns, many with ties to political elites, limiting the smallholder farming sector that typically keeps local food markets competitive and prices low.
Import dependency for value-added food products compounds the problem. Kazakhstan exports raw commodities — grain, sunflower oil, livestock — but imports finished food products at prices that reflect European or Russian manufacturing costs. The result is a terms-of-trade disadvantage that squeezes household budgets.
The FAO's country brief on Kazakhstan has highlighted persistent food security vulnerabilities despite the country's net agricultural export position, noting that domestic price transmission from global markets remains high, amplifying imported inflation.
GDP Growth Without Trickle-Down
For policymakers, the food expenditure data is an inconvenient companion to official growth statistics. The government of President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has pointed to GDP growth and rising nominal wages as evidence of economic progress. But as independent analysts and civil society economists have noted, nominal wage gains are consistently eroded by tenge depreciation and food price inflation.
"The GDP per capita figure is not wrong, but it is incomplete," one civil society economist who monitors household welfare indicators in Almaty noted in a recent policy brief circulated among development organizations. "When you adjust for the actual cost of the consumer basket, real living standards for median households have improved far more slowly than headline statistics suggest."
The food expenditure comparison with Austria is, in this sense, more than a social media observation. It is a compression of a larger story about an economy whose resource wealth has not translated into the broad-based productivity gains that would allow ordinary Kazakhstanis to spend on food the way Austrians do — as an afterthought, rather than a primary economic burden.
In Central Asia, as across the Silk Road, geography determines destiny — and creates opportunities for balanced diplomacy. But geography alone does not fill a household food budget, and the gap between Kazakhstan's resource wealth and its citizens' purchasing power is a political question as much as an economic one.
