Development finance assessment

DIMENSION 5: 
TRANSPARENCY AND ACCOUNTABILITY
relevant knowledge to participate as informed stakeholders and hold the government 
accountable for how it manages public money. The goal of the Citizen’s Budget is to 
improve the effectiveness of the budget process by ensuring wide awareness of the 
citizens about the budget system, the formation and execution of the budgets of all 
levels as well as the budgets of the state targeted funds. It covers the goals and priorities 
of the budgetary policy and simplifies the involvement of the citizens in the budget 
discussion and implementation of monitoring processes.
Budget documentation is comprehensive, of good quality and available publicly, 
including the approved budgets, the in-year budget execution reports, and the annual 
budget execution report. The budget documentation includes tax policy decisions and their 
respective fiscal impact which supports maintaining fiscal discipline and facilitate strategic 
allocation of resources. The consolidated budget document contains the State budget and the 
State targeted funds, and estimated revenue and expenditure of the Fund for Reconstruction 
and Development (FRD). The revenues and expenditures of the State budget and the State 
targeted funds are channeled through the Single Treasury Account (STA), and the annual 
budget execution report includes both the State budget and the State targeted funds. What 
remains missing are pre-budget statements, information on tax expenditures and medium-
term macroeconomic forecasts. 
The public’s access to this fiscal information, however, does not comply with international 
standards (World Bank, 2019). The report of the Chamber of Accounts on the annual execution 
of revenue and expenditure is not being published consistently, despite being debated by 
the Parliament and covered by mass media. There is little information on whether public 
participation forums or events are held in relation to the budget formulation and the hearing 
on audit findings at the Parliament is not publicized. 
Uzbekistan is slowly progressing towards implementing the ‘Law on Openness of Bodies 
of Government and Administration’. There is a uniform electronic system in place for the 
publication of information by public authorities, although some parts of it are still at the 
launching stage. Across all public authorities there are appointed officers responsible 
for ensuring access to information, but they need training. There has been an important 
achievement in the electronic publication of draft and adopted normative legal acts. 
Implementation of these initiative should be continued and followed through with the 
standards and rules for the online publication of open data, having established rules for 
their free repeat use, together with the minimum list of mandatory sets of data, as well as 
ensuring a functioning national portal of open data. It is important to ensure publication of 
publicly important registers.
ACCOUNTABILITY
The performance information on service delivery is hardly available at the planning and 
reporting stage, but steps are taken to promote informed policy decisions and to drive a 
proper accountability process on the outcome of financial execution through delivery of 
public services. Most performance information submitted as part of the budget requests 
have the nature of input or activity information or the number of users and do hardly possess 
characteristics of outputs (with a few exceptions) or outcomes. The budget documentation 
does not contain any performance information. The indicators are listed by budget institution 
and are not related to a specific activities or development programs of budget institutions. 
Like in the planning stage, most listed indicators are not of an output or outcome nature. 
According to Uzbekistan’s central-local government structure subnational governments 
play a role as the central government’s agent in the regions and are accountable to the 

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DEVELOPMENT FINANCE ASSESSMENT FOR THE REPUBLIC OF UZBEKISTAN
central government. Resources are transferred to the local governments while allowing them 
little autonomy or discretion in decision making, thus limiting ownership and accountability.
The GoU’s intention to increase efficiency and accountability of public service delivery 
through introducing PBB may be limited by its tendency to maintain strong, central oversight. 
Public managers should be held accountable for the achievement of stated objectives and 
not for the mix of resources used for attaining those objectives. Strengthening accountability 
of public spending would therefore require an overhaul of public management style practiced 
so far, including enhancing of managers’ authority, flexibility and budgetary discretion and 
providing adequate incentives for them to adopt this new management style. Consequently, 
measures to further strengthen central input controls may conflict with the objective to 
increase performance of spending agencies (UNDP, 2016).
To strengthen civil society contribution to the State planning process, the created the 
Strategy Development Center. This GONGO involve the work of several local organizations, 
including the Independent Civil Society Monitoring Institute, the Legislation Monitoring 
Institute, the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Chamber of Advocates, the Academy 
of Public Administration, the National Association of Electronic Media, and the National 
Association of NGOs. The Center is intended to consolidate efforts of these institutes to 
facilitate expert and public discussions on reforms outlined in the five-year development 
strategy. Public review of the legislation can be implemented through a dedicated website.

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KEY FINDINGS
KEY FINDINGS
This DFA reveals that available development finance falls short of financing needs to 
achieve the SDGs. The onset of the COVID-19 crisis risks further widening this financing gap 
and undoing SDG progress. Avoiding this requires concerted action to scale up ongoing 
efforts to build the enabling environment (legal, political, regulatory, etc.) and the supporting 
ecosystems (institutions and actors) for increasing the impact of the different forms of 
financial resources towards achieving the SDGs in Uzbekistan. 
This first assessment of Uzbekistan’s development finance context identifies the scale of 
the challenge ahead. Its key findings are summarized according to the four building blocks
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of an INFF (Table 5).