Macroeconomic Drivers of Inflation in a CommodityExporting Economy: Evidence from Kazakhstan

Inflation remains a central macroeconomic challenge for emerging economies, as persistent price instability undermines economic growth, distorts income distribution, and weakens the effectiveness of monetary policy. This study aims to assess the relationships between inflation, the policy rate, the exchange rate, oil prices, and National Fund transfers in Kazakhstan using annual data for 2000–2025 and an Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model. The initial data consist of annual time series for 2000–2025, including 26 observations for each indicator, compiled from statistics from the Bureau of National Statistics, the National Bank of Kazakhstan, the World Bank, and the Ministry of Finance of the Republic of Kazakhstan. Descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, the Dickey–Fuller test, and the ARDL autoregressive distributed lag model were used. The coefficient for the lagged exchange rate was −0.0733 (p = 0.0274), and for the current logarithm of the oil price, it was 6.9936 (p = 0.0048), while the current and lagged coefficients for the interest rate and the logarithm of National Fund transfers are statistically insignificant at the 5% level. The model is characterized by a determination coefficient of R² = 0.6546 and overall statistical significance (F = 1.159; p = 0.0239), however, the bounds test did not confirm the presence of a long-term relationship between the variables (F = 2.4282; p = 0.3762). These results contribute to a deeper understanding of the factors influencing inflation in Kazakhstan and can inform monetary and macroeconomic policy.

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