Earlier in September this year, World Bank presented its annual report, rating 175 countries by ease of Doing Business. According to the report, Kazakhstan has gone 20 points up in the rating. Certainly, this fact was presented by the Kazakh semi-official and loyal media outlets as “another breakthrough” and “sign of leadership”. However, for me, as usual, it was not enough. I decided to look closer at the components of this rating.

See table here

Thus, the first glance at 10 indices clarifies the situation. The situation worsened in half of the criteria, including “starting a business”, “protecting investors”, “paying taxes” (each went three points down) and employing workers (one point down). The index “trading across borders” is pretty exotic - last year Kazakhstan was on 171st place out of 175, this year - 1 point down.

As for achievements of the republic - two points added for “dealing with licenses” and “closing a business”. Though, by both of these criteria, Kazakhstan remains staying on the lower part of the rating (119 and 100 places correspondingly). Progress in “registering property” (five points) and invariance in “enforcing contracts” are, possibly, a success, but the only and major reason of leap forward was “getting credit”. Kazakhstan jumped from 117th up to 48th place.

In other words, the most significant improvement of conditions for doing business in Kazakhstan took place due to the activity of commercial private sector (there is no state crediting of SMEs in Kazakhstan), improvement of its approaches to their own activity, and their efforts on increasing their own attractiveness for the domestic entrepreneurs.

Meanwhile, other criteria, which more or less depend on efficiency of state’s regulatory actions, highlight lack of progress or even regress. At that, it should be reminded that the basis of current financial sector of Kazakhstan - the most successful segment of national economy nowadays - mainly was founded by the today’s opposition leaders.