Alberto Rubio / E.e Tashkent (Uzbekistan)
Uzbekistan aspires to be the economic center of Central Asia in the coming years, according to President Shavkat Mirziyoyev during the III International Investment Forum that opened yesterday in Tashkent, with the participation of 2,500 delegates from 93 countries. To this end, he has the clear support of Saudi Arabia, whose representatives are omnipresent in all the discussions at this meeting.
“We want to present ourselves to our future investors as a reliable and stable partner,” said Uzbekistan’s President Shaktar Myrzoyayev during the opening session, at which he was accompanied by Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Energy, Prince Abdulaziz Bin Salman Al Saud, and the President of the OPEC Fund for International Development, Abdulhamid Alkhalifa, also a Saudi, confirming the importance attached to this forum by the authorities in Riyadh.
The opening session was also attended by the Vice-President of Turkey, Cevdet Yilmaz; the Speaker of the Singapore Parliament, Seah Cian Peng; the Prime Minister of Kyrgyzstan, Akylbek Zhaparov; the Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Europe, Tatiana Molcean; and the President of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), Odile Renaud-Basso.
During his speech, Myrzoyayev explained Uzbekistan’s economic progress in the last seven years – when he was elected president after the death of Islam Karimov – due to the reforms he implemented and which he described as “a challenging economic development program”.
Although the opposition continues to criticize Myrzoyayev for the lack of depth of his political reforms and the lack of freedoms, the macroeconomic data for 2022, the latest available published by the World Bank, support his policies: the GDP maintains a moderate but constant growth (3.5% on average), the GDP per capita is also growing and, although inflation remains high (13.5%), everything indicates that it is relatively under control.
These data led the Uzbek leader yesterday to underline his intention to continue to comply with “what the international markets are asking of us, which is to remain stable”. In this respect, the data of the Doing Business index, which measures the ease of doing business in a country, also support him: Uzbekistan is ranked 68th in the world, according to the efe 2022 ranking. On the other hand, the World Bank has placed it among the five countries that have improved the most in the ‘Women, Business and the Law 2024’ index, which measures gender equality in business.
After assuring that the volume of foreign investments in Uzbekistan doubled last year, Myrzoyayev identified four sectors as priorities to receive foreign investments within a public-private partnership scheme: roads, water supply, sanitary services and infrastructure, to which he later added two more: green energy and the financial sector.
The Uzbek president listed some of the innovations with which his government wants to ensure the stability that, as he mentioned at the beginning, foreign investors are demanding. In this regard, he pointed out that the Anti-Corruption Agency and the International Arbitration Center should contribute to improving the perception of the Uzbek economy abroad. And he also added his personal commitment to education – “education, education, education”, he insisted – as an essential part of his goal to train a more qualified workforce.
The forum, which yesterday featured panels on “Water Resources Management,” “Improving Corporate Governance,” “Fintech in Uzbekistan,” or “Why Invest in Uzbekistan,” will close today with several expert sessions addressing issues such as “Investing in Green Energy.” “The Role of Artificial Intelligence”, “A New Investment Law” or “Strategies for Resilience and Growth”, in addition to an event organized by the International Islamic Trade Finance Corporation where the Central Asia Trade Connect program will be launched.
