Edward Belyaev, Bakhtier Ergashev. National “Digitalization” Projects in Central Asia: Opportunities and Perspectives for Russian (Tomsk) IT Companies

The era of Internet is changing the fabric of our being sweepingly and globally. Digital technologies are now widely used in the consumer economy as well as in the system of the government planning. It is all happening in front of us. We are the contemporaries of the wide scale processes of the society transformation towards its digitalization. However, it is hard to say where it will lead us and how it will end. The experience of digital projects in the leading countries suggests various trajectories.

This paper aims at analyzing digitalization processes in Central Asia in the global, Eurasian, regional and national dimensions. In the framework of this research, we will try to answer the following questions: how intense are the national projects? What do they aim for? What are their sources of funding and main executors? How can they be of interest for the Russian public, business and educational structures?