Аннотация
The study aims to identify the factors driving the accelerated economic development of Almaty, Astana, Shenzhen, Chengdu, and Xi’an and to determine the conditions for adapting the Chinese experience to Kazakhstan’s urban policy. The analysis covers 2010-2025 and combines complete annual series of Kazakhstan’s real growth with a comparison of the five cities in the reference years of 2010, 2015, 2020, and 2025. The study calculates chain indices of physical volume, assesses the deviation of urban growth from national growth, and conducts a structured analysis of six factor blocks. From 2011 to 2025, the accumulated real GRP index (base year 2010 = 100) reached 227.2 in Almaty and 253.4 in Astana, compared with 177.7 for Kazakhstan as a whole. At the same time, in 2025, Almaty grew more slowly than the national economy, while Astana maintained a positive deviation. In the Chinese part of the sample, Shenzhen and Chengdu exceeded the national rates in all four control years; Xi’an, in 2025, fell below this benchmark. The results reflect interactions among agglomeration, investment, sectoral structure, innovation, human capital, and external connectivity. Different mechanisms for generating added value can accompany the same focus on services. For Kazakhstan, measures include developing production ties, commercialising research, improving infrastructure accessibility, and evaluating investment projects based on their results. The novelty of the work lies in distinguishing accumulated progress, current acceleration, and the prerequisites for further development in a single comparative scheme. Limitations include differences in administrative boundaries, revisions to statistics, and the incompleteness of the harmonised Chinese annual series. The conclusions are of a comparative nature; the causal coefficients of the influence of factors are not evaluated.