Of the city of Аlatau: tax autonomy and the unity of the legal space

The article examines the special legal regime of the city of Alatau not merely as another instrument of regional development, but as a new form of territorially limited legal experiment within a unitary state. The study focuses on three interrelated issues: the creation of a special institutional environment for private investment, the introduction of functional elements of tax and budgetary autonomy, and the reconciliation of these features with the constitutional unity of the legal space of the Republic of Kazakhstan. The article argues that the Alatau regime cannot be reduced to the ordinary model of a special economic zone, since the Constitutional Law covers city governance, special regulatory acts of the administration, tax preferences, investment disputes, contractual models and experimental legal regimes. At the same time, such differentiation is not unlimited: the law expressly excludes citizens’ rights and freedoms, personal data, criminal law and several other protected areas from the scope of the special regime. The author shows that investment predictability, administrative flexibility and an infrastructural impulse must be balanced by legal safeguards: an open register of acts, fiscal assessment of tax preferences, periodic audit of experimental regimes and accessible mechanisms of legal protection.

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