Kazakhstan expands coop with Israel in key economic sectors
The delegation included a large team from the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Aerospace Industry and Defense and other organizations headed by Minister B. Atamkulov who held a number of meetings and visited industrial facilities in Israel.
The mission of this visit was to implement the agreements between our countries reached earlier during the official visit of Israeli Prime Minister B. Netanyahu to Kazakhstan in December 2016, as well as the decisions of the intergovernmental commission held prior to this visit.
A number of negotiations regarding industry, development of information and communication technologies, finance, agriculture was held with Israeli state and business structures.
During the visit, B. Sultanov met Israeli Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon and the leadership of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The Kazakhstan-Israel Intergovernmental Commission is one of the tools that contribute to creating conditions for doing business in our countries and attracting investments to Kazakhstan. In this connection, the meeting of Minister of Finance B.Sultanov as a co-chairman of the intergovernmental commission with the representatives of Israeli business community was organized.
Also, the representatives of the Kazakh Ministry of Finance studied the experience of building state centers of common services on the example of the implemented Merkava project in the Government of Israel, automation of budget planning processes, state assets management and public procurement.
In addition, in the information and communication field, mutual understanding has been achieved in cooperation under the Digital Kazakhstan and Digital Israel programmes. The specialists of the Ministry of Agriculture considered opportunities for joint cooperation of Kazakhstani and Israeli farmers in the field of technology transfer and establishment of joint ventures. In the field of healthcare, the experts of the Ministry of Health of Kazakhstan discussed issues of qualification improvement, master classes by Israeli specialists in Kazakhstan, transfer of Kazakhstan university clinics to trust management of Israeli companies.
The next meeting of the intergovernmental commission will be held in May this year.
For reference:
Mutual trade turnover between Kazakhstan and Israel (according to the Statistics Committee of the Ministry of Energy of the Republic of Kazakhstan) in January-December 2016 amounted to USD 301.9mln: USD 235.5mln of export and USD 66.mln of import. In 12 months of 2015, the volume of export made USD 219.073mln and import volume rose to USD 92.034mln.
For the period from 2005 to the first half of 2016, gross inflow of direct investments from Israel to Kazakhstan amounted to USD 213mln. The main area of investment is the agro-industrial complex and the oil and gas sector. For the period from 2005 to the first half of 2016, the gross outflow of direct investment from Kazakhstan to Israel amounted to USD 13.5mln.