Uzbekistan has leapt up the World Bank’s ease of doing business rankings, from 166th in 2012 to 76th this year
from faraway countries tour Western financial centres to tout their plans for economic reform, their presentations are often drearily predictable. There is typically lots of talk about “fiscal consolidation”, improvements to infrastructure and the soundness of the banking system. Not Djamshed Kuchkarov, finance minister of Uzbekistan: he is proudest of what his government is not doing.
Mr Mirziyoyev has sharply devalued the currency, the som, bringing the official and black-market rates into alignment. Exporters are no longer required to sell a quarter of their foreign-currency revenue to the government. This is important not just to cross-border businesses, Mr Kuchkarov argues, but also to ordinary Uzbeks, since the past shortage of hard currency had led to a shortage of cash, as businesses hoarded notes with which to buy dollars on the black market.
. The government has greatly simplified the tax code, to turn it into a mechanism for actually collecting tax, rather than bribes. It is also restructuring state-owned enterprises, with a view to their eventual privatisation. The management of airports and the state-owned airline is being separated, for example, as are the generation, transmission and distribution of electricity.
But as the bond prospectus noted, the immediate impact of all the upheaval is to hamper the economy. Inflation has jumped to 14%, thanks to the devaluation of the som.Investors remain wary. They especially distrust the courts, which readily endorsed past expropriations. The government has stopped the most blatant forms of cronyism, such as handing out the right to import certain goods duty-free to those with friends in high places.
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