A recent study on 32 Mexican cities (World Bank, 2016c) measured the ease of Doing Business based on four criteria: starting a business, dealing with construction permits, registering property and enforcing contracts,51 showed substantial differences across cities, with at least one of them performing better than high-income OECD members. The conclusion for Kazakhstan is that an assessment of subnational differences in the business climate would provide a clearer understanding of the differences across regions and cities to incentivise business and investment, and place government in a better position to design and implement policy. The fifth wave of the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS), provides insight into the variations of the perception of firms on the business environment across the country. For instance, insufficient education in the workforce is more often reported as the main obstacle to doing business in medium-size cities than in Almaty City or Astana (Table 1.8 above).