Diagnosing Kazakhstan's innovation-to-competitiveness chain: A four-layer comparison with five European Union economies
Authors
-
Zhuldyz Yespolova
VŠB — Technical University of Ostrava, Ostrava, Czech Republic
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31489/2026FEB1/1408Keywords:
ұлттық инновациялық жүйелер; сіңіру қабілеті; тұрақты бәсекеге қабілеттілік; Қазақстан; Еуропалық Одақ; саясат диагностикасы.Abstract
Countries that want to move beyond a natural-resource growth model face a hard question. Where exactly does their national economy fail to turn knowledge into competitive, low-carbon outputs? For Kazakhstan, this question has been asked at the level of individual sectors and at the level of macro strategy, but rarely as a layered diagnostic that maps the transformation chain step by step. This paper builds such a diagnostic. It treats national innovation systems and national absorptive capacity as the mediators that stand between knowledge inputs and structural, sustainable outcomes, and it applies the diagnostic to Kazakhstan and five European Union economies chosen to bracket the relevant institutional and structural conditions: Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and Finland. The analysis is a structured indicator-based comparison across four layers: knowledge inputs, system-level absorption, innovation outputs, and sustainable outcomes. Twelve indicators are used, three per layer, drawn from Eurostat, the World Bank, WIPO GII 2024, the European Innovation Scoreboard 2025, and the Bureau of National Statistics of Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan's
break-point is not in Layer 1. Tertiary attainment among 25–34-year-olds is 55.7 per cent, higher than in every European Union comparator in the sample. The break-point is Layer 2. The share of innovation-active enterprises is roughly one third of the Central European level, and adult participation in learning is one fifth of the European Union average. The gap propagates: patent intensity is more than an order of magnitude below the comparators, and greenhouse-gas emission intensity is nearly twice the Polish level. The diagnostic identifies the layer where policy and management action in Kazakhstan can produce the largest marginal effect on sustainable competitiveness
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