As bad as things may have got for Kazakhstan, authorities have tended to grasp the tender slip of consolation that the economy was expected to grow in 2016, if only slightly.

Analysts at the London-based Economist Intelligence Unit now beg to differ and are predicting that Kazakhstan is set for its first year of negative growth in nearly two decades.

“We have revised our forecast for Kazakhstan and now expect GDP to contract for the first time since 1998,” the think tank tweeted on January 22.

An accompanying table showed that the EIU believes the economy will shrink by 2 percent this year, posting negative growth for the first time since 1998.

Years of near double-digit growth were fueled by surging oil prices, and the slump has accordingly been caused by the collapse in the cost of the commodity, which accounts for about one-quarter of Kazakhstan’s economy.

EIU’s prediction, the gloomiest one out there for Kazakhstan, piles on the misery as the country comes to terms with the economy slowing to just 1.5 percent last year, down from 4.3 percent in 2014.

The government is now recalculating its budget, with the most pessimistic scenario based on oil costing just $16 per barrel on average over the year, Prime Minister Karim Masimov said last week. The government’s core scenario is based on $40 oil, well above the sub-$30 per barrel mark registered most of last week.

Kazakhstan is also bearing the brunt of a slowdown in its major trading partners Russia, which is in full-blown recession, and China, which posted its lowest growth in a quarter of a century
last year.

Although the slump is hitting living standards in Kazakhstan, the rumblings of discontent have so far been highly contained.

On January 20, a couple of dozen debtors held a public protest outside a bank in the commercial capital of Almaty. The protesters are disgruntled at how Kazakhstan’s collapsing currency is causing the value of their dollar-denominated debts to rocket.

The tenge has lost some 50 percent of its value since the central bank stopped propping it up last August, to stand at 373 to the dollar at close of morning trading on January 25.