A pending customs union involving Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan could open a way for Georgian food products to get around a Moscow-imposed trade embargo.
Sources close to the strategic Uzbek conglomerate Zeromax claim the company's operations are being wound down by the government, RFE/RL's Uzbek Service reports.
Authorities in Tajikistan have banned drivers of eight-seat Chinese Hafei minivans from carrying passengers in the capital Dushanbe, putting out of work hundreds who used these relatively affordable vehicles to ferry residents around the Tajik capital.
Officials in Georgia hope that obtaining trademark protection for khachapuri, the cheese-filled Georgian pastry that has a lip-smacking fan base throughout the former Soviet Union, can help open new markets in the United States and Western Europe for Georgian cuisine and food products.
Kyrgyzstan's efforts to finally democratize following multiple bouts of authoritarianism will depend, to a great extent, on the country's small- and medium-sized business owners. These entrepreneurs, a relatively small group in Kyrgyzstan, have the potential to act as a collective engine of economic growth, and by extension political moderation.
Wanting to diversify its energy-export-dependent economy, officials in Azerbaijan have expressed a desire to turn Baku into a high-tech hub. But industry executives in Baku say the government is not backing its words with actions.
Rumors have swirled in Western capitals of late that Turkmenistan is on the verge of committing a specific amount of natural gas to a Western-backed, trans-Caspian export route. But a source within the Turkmen government is telling an opposition website that such talk is nothing more than a pipe dream.
Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan have gone on a weapons spending spree over the past decade, collectively increasing their defense spending five-fold, according to a report recently released by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
An unprecedented thing happened last year in Konya, the capital of the province where Turkey's mould-breaking foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu was born in 1959. For the first time in its recent history, this agricultural center-turned-industrial boom town exported more goods to the Middle East than to Europe.
