Kazakhs with their backs to the wall

When Kazakhstan's president Nursultan Nazarbayev uprooted the capital's home from Almaty to Akmola, then in May renamed the new capital Astana (Akmola means ("white tomb", Astana means "the capital"), there were plenty of jokes kicking around in back rooms of the country. "The president wants to be a big reformer. Lenin moved the capital, and George Washington moved his. If you want to think big, move the capital," a former Kazakh government official said.

Foreign portfolio investors who have waited for the past two years for Kazakhstan's economy to come of age are less amused. "Kazakhstan is like a company which has issued a negative earnings announcement. It's become a show-me stock," says Harlan Zimmerman, a portfolio manager at Foreign & Colonial in London. Despite the country's vast natural resources and government promises to kick-start the blue-chip privatization program, progress has...