Kazakhstan needs to promote economic diversification in order to reduce the country’s reliance on the natural resource sectors (OECD, 2016). The Kazakh economy is projected to start expanding again in 2017 with GDP growth expected to reach 2.5% (IMF, 2017b). However, poverty rates remain much higher in rural than in urban areas; in 2015 the rural poverty headcount ratio, at 4.9%, was almost four times higher than the urban figure of 1.3% (Figure 1.1, right panel). Real wages have increased by 280% over the last decade, compared with an OECD average of 17%‘. The World Bank estimates that in Kazakhstan the Gini index - a coefficient that measures the income inequality in a society and ranges from 0 (perfect equality) to 1 (maximal inequality) - stood at 0.263 in 2013 (the most recent available data) down from 0.347 in 1996. This is considerably lower than the average Gini coefficient across OECD countries, which has shown an upward trend and reached 0.32 in 2013.