He pledged to cut his personal carbon footprint and emissions from his department's headquarters by 10% in 2010.
The 10% hurdle, dating from the military-authored constitution of 1980, had been intended in part to diminish Kurdish representation in the parliament.
Thanks to energy exports, Kazakhstan is central Asia's most prosperous state, with annual economic growth averaging about 10% for much of the first decade of the new millennium.
He would abolish the income tax for the vast bulk of Americans and replace the revenue with a 12.5 percent value-added tax.
It's not nearly as big a problem as the 40 percent of children who are born out of wedlock.
He announced pay cuts of about 5 percent for civil servants — and 15 percent for government ministers — as well as other measures totaling 15 billion euros.
The steps included increasing the broader retirement age to 65 and cutting public salaries to bring the deficit down from the current 13.6 percent of G.D.P. to less than 3 percent in 2014.
In this slump, it is down almost 7 percent, and still has not really begun to recover.
This month, the Portuguese government agreed with the main opposition party on more austerity measures to cut its deficit faster than planned, to 4.6 percent of Portugal's gross domestic product next year from 9.4 percent last year.
It has acknowledged that the deficit, forecast at 8 percent of G.D.P. this year, needs to fall.
Going back decades, such spending had never fallen more than 3 percent per capita in a recession.
