"Central Asia’s long-term economic vitality will depend on the ability of the region’s economies to participate in global value chains and possibly upgrade to higher value-added activities. Value chains have transformed global trade and production by enabling the stages of a product to be dispersed across countries. This is particularly true where the right skills and input requirements are available at competitive cost and quality.
Many developing countries in Asia are struggling to capture better deals at the higher end of global value chains. The global value chain participation of Central Asia has remained limited largely because of its narrow trade portfolio, concentrated in few trading partners. In contrast, economies like the Republic of Korea and Singapore are fairly well integrated into production networks and they are—to varying degrees of success—climbing the global value chain hill. Central Asia is still in the valley."
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Source: ADB