Uzbekistan's economy: from white gold to gold

How cotton ran the economy and then receded

Cotton has been grown in the oases for centuries, but its dominance is a twentieth-century creation. The Russian conquest of the 1860s was driven in part by the need for a secure supply after the American Civil War interrupted Russia's imports, and the Soviet planners of the late 1950s decided that Uzbekistan should specialise in it. The republic came to grow 61% of all Soviet cotton, according to the FAO, in exchange for water, energy and food supplied from elsewhere in the Soviet system. The crop earned the name white gold.

Independence kept the system. The state continued to fix the area under cotton and wheat, to order farmers to deliver the harvest to designated buyers at state prices and to use the difference to subsidise industry. Many farmers concentrated on the fruit and vegetables of their household plots, whose prices the market set, and some smuggled cotton and wheat into Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan for better prices. The United Nations University describes how two to three million people were mobilised each year for a corvée of two to eight weeks, through neighbourhood committees, universities, hospitals and employers, and estimates that around a fifth of the adult population was forced to pick cotton each year between 1992 and 2017.

The share of cotton in the economy fell long before the system ended. The Wikipedia article on the economy records the area under cotton falling from 2 million hectares in 1990 to less than 1.5 million in 2006 as wheat replaced it for food security, and annual production dropping from about 3 million tonnes in the decade before independence to around 1.2 million after 1995. Its figures for cotton's share of exports, about 45% in the early 1990s and 17% in 2006, differ from the United Nations University's, which gives 90% for 1992.

The forced-labour system came apart after 2016. The ILO counted 448,000 people in forced labour in the harvest in 2014 and 102,000 in 2019, the government abolished the centralised production system for cotton in May 2020, and the Cotton Campaign, a coalition formed in 2007, lifted its call for a global boycott on 10 March 2022 after monitors found no state-imposed forced labour in the 2021 harvest. The campaign still lists risks: government control of the harvest, limits on independent monitoring and on freedom of association. Cotton is now kept at home for processing, and the Wikipedia article records textile exports doubling in recent years.

What lies under the Kyzylkum

Gold comes chiefly from the Kyzylkum, and Britannica notes that centuries of rumours about gold in the region turned out to have a basis in fact. At the Muruntau field a plant for heat-leaching gold from low-grade ore was built in the mid-1990s by a subsidiary of the American Newmont Mining Corporation, as a joint venture with the government; Newmont lost its share in a legal battle, in 2006 or 2007 depending on the source. The Navoi Mining and Metallurgical Company is the main enterprise in the industry, and the Wikipedia country article gives the country's gold output as 102 tonnes in 2015. The National Statistics Committee's figures show how much of the export trade gold now carries. In January to August 2026 total exports came to USD 22.9 billion, 3.4% less than a year earlier, while exports of goods other than gold reached USD 11.5 billion, up 28.7%. The IMF's mission of April 2026 named higher gold prices among the supports of growth and advised the government to manage its volatile mineral revenue with a separate ceiling on the non-mineral deficit.

The ground holds more than gold. Britannica describes copper, zinc, lead, tungsten and molybdenum extracted in the Olmaliq mining belt of the Kurama range and in the Ohangaron field south-east of Tashkent, coal mined at Angren since the Second World War, and oil in the Fergana Valley, around Bukhara and in Karakalpakstan. Natural gas is consumed in large amounts at home and piped from Bukhara as far as the Urals. Uzbekneftegaz is the state oil and gas company.

How the som was opened to the market

The currency is the som, issued by the Central Bank of Uzbekistan. It replaced a coupon currency on 1 July 1994 at 1,000 coupons to one som, starting at 7 som to the US dollar. Inflation of around 1,000% a year in 1992 to 1994 pushed it to 969 som to the dollar by December 2002. From 1996 to 2003, and again by 2011, official rates set by the central bank ran alongside a black market: at the end of 1999 the street rate was 550 som to the dollar against an official 140. The government accepted the IMF's obligations on convertibility in 2003, but currency controls and closed borders blunted the effect, and the Wikipedia country article calls conversion the largest barrier foreign companies faced in entering the market.

In September 2017 the som became fully convertible at market rates, and Britannica records that the same policies lifted many barriers to trade and courted foreign investment. The IMF's staff statement of April 2026 records the results for 2025: growth of 7.7%, unemployment down to 4.8%, inflation at 7.3% at the end of the year against 9.8% a year earlier, a current account deficit narrowed to 3.9% of GDP and reserves covering about 13 months of imports. The central bank held its policy rate at 14% from March 2025 against an inflation target of 5%, and the som appreciated 6.9% against the dollar in 2025.

The budget has been kept tight: the fiscal deficit fell to 2.1% of GDP in 2025, below the government's 3% target, helped by high commodity prices. The same statement lists what remains to be done: privatising state-owned banks and enterprises, ending directed and preferential lending, and reversing a decline in the ratio of tax to GDP since 2020. The Wikipedia article on the economy reports that the government still controlled about 65% of the banking sector in 2024 and held stakes in UzAuto Motors and Uzbekneftegaz.

What the factories make

Britannica describes a machine-building industry that makes equipment for cotton cultivation, harvesting and processing, textiles, irrigation and road building. The first metallurgical plant began work at Bekobod in 1946, and an aircraft plant evacuated to Tashkent during the Second World War built aircraft for the Soviet Union until the late 1980s. Car assembly began as a venture with the Korean company Daewoo, which signed a strategic agreement with General Motors' Korean arm in May 2007; UzAuto Motors, in which the state holds a stake, controls up to 90% of the domestic market according to the Wikipedia economy article. Newer industry makes consumer goods. The appliance maker Artel raised its exports from USD 5.6 million in 2017 to about USD 100 million in 2021, and fruit, textiles and appliances replaced gas and raw cotton among growing exports after 2017. The National Statistics Committee put industrial output at UZS 926.5 trillion in January to August 2026, 8% more than a year earlier, with 65.3 thousand industrial enterprises operating on 1 September 2026.

What the farms grow besides cotton

Irrigated land produces more than 90% of the country's crops. Wheat was the first crop to take land from cotton: the FAO records the winter wheat area rising from 620,000 hectares in 1991 to 750,000 in 1996, and production growing from 1 million tonnes in 1991 to 5.2 million in 2004, enough for Uzbekistan to export some 500,000 tonnes of wheat a year according to a 2009 study the FAO cites. Britannica lists melons, apricots, pomegranates, grapes, apples, cherries and figs among the fruit, and notes that silkworms have been raised since the fourth century, fed on mulberry trees planted along streets and ditches, with the Fergana Valley the centre of silk production.

Much of the food comes from small plots. Prices for fruit, vegetables, milk and meat were left to the market while cotton and wheat were state-ordered, so households turned to their own produce: the number of cattle rose from 4 million in 1990 to 7 million in 2006, almost all kept by rural families with two or three head each. The 2026 population and agriculture census, the first since independence, counted the livestock held by these dehkan holdings and household plots as at 15 January 2026.

Where services and tourism are growing

Services were the fastest-growing part of the economy in 2025, together with construction, according to the IMF. Information technology is small but expanding: the Wikipedia country article puts it at about 2.1% of GDP in 2024, with IT service exports of about USD 1 billion, and records that the digital company Uzum was valued at over USD 1 billion in 2024 and USD 1.5 billion in 2025. Retail still runs mostly through bazaars, though supermarket chains and the first shopping malls opened in Tashkent in the years after 2017.

Tourism has grown fastest of all. The Wikipedia article on tourism records about 1 million international arrivals in 2016 and 7 million in 2023. For 2025 the National Statistics Committee's preliminary count is 11.7 million foreign visitors for tourism, 3.7 million more than in 2024, a rise it attributes partly to the easing of visa rules. Most of those visitors come from neighbouring countries: of 6.6 million counted in 2023, 4,364.8 thousand arrived from them, according to the national tourism information centre.

How much depends on work abroad

The Wikipedia country article reports that almost 10% of the labour force works outside the country, mostly in Russia and Kazakhstan; its economy article cites Russia's Federal Migration Service for 2.5 million Uzbek migrant workers in Russia and a United States estimate of three to five million working-age citizens living abroad. The IMF counts remittance inflows among the reasons the current account deficit narrowed in 2025, lists buoyant remittances among the supports of growth in 2026 and expects them to slow in 2027. Freedom House reported in 2025 that Uzbek migrant workers in Russia had been pressed to enlist in the Russian army, and Uzbek courts convicted several citizens for serving as mercenaries there.

Who Uzbekistan trades with

Imports are growing faster than exports. The National Statistics Committee recorded foreign trade turnover of USD 57.4 billion in January to August 2026, 7.6% more than a year earlier, with imports up 16.3% to USD 34.5 billion. China and Russia accounted for nearly two-fifths of the total:

Britannica lists Switzerland, China, Turkey and Kazakhstan as the main destinations of exports, and China, Russia, South Korea and Kazakhstan as the main sources of imports. Uzbekistan applied to join the World Trade Organization in December 1994 and has held observer status since; the IMF's 2026 statement names completing the reforms for accession among its recommendations.