By The Diplomat | Created at 2026-09-15 16:41:56 | Updated at 2026-10-06 08:59:42
2 weeks ago
It was a short press release, published on a Friday afternoon and easily missed.
The International Monetary Fund’s executive board had considered a report on “Turkmenistan’s observance of its obligations… which requires member countries to provide data necessary for the IMF’s activities.”
Ashgabat, the board said, “has not provided key required data, including information on international reserve assets, official holdings of gold and foreign exchange, and a complete balance of payments.”
This non-provision, the statement continued, “could not be explained by a lack of capacity and therefore constitutes a breach of Turkmenistan’s obligations.” In six months, the board will consider again Turkmenistan’s progress, the statement said, noting that the provision of data helps the IMF support effective policy formation.
The IMF probably shouldn’t hold its proverbial breath.
“This is not something new,” Aynabat Yaylymova, executive director of the Progres Foundation told The Diplomat. “Concealing information is a key to a regime’s survival.”
The Progres Foundation works with Turkmen experts to monitor, research, and highlight human development in Turkmenistan in absence of reliable government data or adequate government attention.
Keen readers of the regular World Bank Global Economic Prospects reports will have noted that for years, footnotes touch on Turkmenistan’s exclusion from various data sets. In 2021, one such report noted: “Due to lack of reliable data of adequate quality, the World Bank is currently not publishing economic output, income, or growth data for Turkmenistan and República Bolivariana de Venezuela.”
A 2024 World Bank publication titled “Turkmenistan Economic Report” explained via a highlighted box buried at the end of the report that, “Turkmenistan provides limited trade data publications, compounded by concerns about the reliability of Turkmenistan’s official statistics.” The box went on to explain how the analysts triangulated trade statistics for the country via the mirrored data sets of 109 other countries, but noted that this method has its own failings – especially since Russia and Belarus no longer share trade data either.
In March 2018 the IMF issued a declaration of censure against Venezuela, in light of its failure to take action on a November 2017 warning that mirrors the notice issued last week to Turkmenistan. Since Venezuela was not, at the time, actively borrowing from the IMF the censure had little bite.
“I am not sure the IMF has leverage in this case since the government does not use its financial resources,” Yaylymova commented. “The government also does not care about its reputation.”
Ashgabat joined the IMF in 1992 but has engaged only marginally, never taking part in any assistance or borrowing programs. Doing so would undercut the myth the Turkmen government repeats ad nauseum: Turkmen are living in a golden age.
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“Turkmenistan’s story since independence is the story of the government that operates with impunity and extreme opacity,” Yaylymova explained.
When The Diplomat asked why Turkmenistan is so recalcitrant with its data, Yaylymova said that, “Providing the IMF with a complete, verifiable balance of payments and official reserve data would force the government to expose exactly where the billions from the sales of natural gas are held, how they are managed, and how they are spent. This is in the context where citizens have never seen the state budget.”
Turkmenistan’s state news platform is named “Altyn Asyr” – “Golden Age” – and ostentatiously hopeful language pervades government statements, regardless of the actual reality of life in Turkmenistan.
“If the government provides the data requested by the IMF,” Yaylymova continued, “it will officially dismantle the autocratic regime’s domestic propaganda narrative and expose the true state of the economy to both its citizens, international community, and markets.”
According to the Turkmen government, the growth rate sits at 6.3 percent – around where it has been since 2015. Not even the COVID-19 pandemic dented Turkmenistan’s officially reported growth rate. But, according to Ashgabat, in Turkmenistan there was no COVID-19 pandemic.
“During COVID… Turkmens counted graves to understand the level of infection,” Yaylymova said, noting that there are always indirect ways of understanding reality in the absence of data.
“In economic mismanagement and grand corruption we should look at deeply neglected human potential and increased migration out of the country.”
Earlier this month, RFE/RL’s Turkmen Service, Radio Azatlyk, reported that young people who previously studied abroad were being prevented from leaving the country. This isn’t new either.
“It is crucial to understand the domestic context. Poverty is deepening in Turkmenistan,” Yaylymova told The Diplomat.
The Progres Foundation publishes a unique economic index, the Palaw Index, which tracks inflation via the ingredients of palaw, the national dish of Turkmenistan comprised of beef, oil, onions, carrots, and rice, known elsewhere as plov, osh, or pilaf. According to the April/June 2026 index, the average cost of making the dish in the capital city reached 91.4 Turkmen manat ($26.16), a 29.4 percent jump from the same period in 2025. The increase was driven primarily by a sharp rise in beef prices which the analysis attributes to “substantial livestock losses – particularly in the Ahal region – caused by drought, malnutrition, and disease.”
None of that was reported in Turkmen state media.
On September 14, however, one headline announced that “The National Leader of the Turkmen people, Chairman of the Halk Maslakhaty of Turkmenistan, Hero-Arkadag, got acquainted with the progress of the second stage of the new city and the developed projects,” in reference to Turkmenistan’s top leader, Gurbanguly Berdimehamedov – father of the current president, Serdar Berdimehamedov – and the bespoke smart city being built for an estimated $5 billion that bears his nickname, meaning “protector.”
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Turkmenistan ranks fourth globally in terms of proven gas reserves, sitting between Qatar and Saudi Arabia. An estimated 90 percent of its gas exports go to China for unknown billions in revenue. But Turkmen citizens and international financial institutions alike don’t know exactly where the money goes.
“The public has no idea where the revenues from natural resources go,” Yaylymova told The Diplomat. “In an authoritarian and kleptocratic regime such as Turkmenistan data means accountability, it means that someone is going to keep you accountable by questioning your data, logic, and assumptions and what you do or you do not do.”
An absence of data is an absence of accountability. It “enables economic mismanagement, arbitrary and opaque rule,” Yaylymova said.
The IMF may lack leverage over Turkmenistan, but censure, Yaylymova said, is nevertheless long overdue.
“The government keeps exaggerating the growth rate while the population is plunging deeper into despair and poverty,” she stressed. It’s important, she concluded, for international organizations and Turkmenistan’s partners to “start naming the structural issues” directly and start “calling on the government publicly to meet its obligations.”
“No investment, no engagement should come without the government’s demonstrated capacity [for] accountability.”
