Uzbekistan Quality Job Creation as a Cornerstone for Sustainable Economic Growth

Uzbekistan Quality Job Creation as a Cornerstone for Sustainable Economic Growth
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Greater involvement in regional integration to facilitate trade, FDI, and 
job creation. 
An important step toward trade facilitation is participation in 
regional and international agreements, including the Eurasian Economic Union 
and the WTO. To this end, the negotiation process to accede to the WTO 
needs to be accelerated. Second, greater involvement in regional integration 
is needed to harmonize and coordinate general liberalization policies. The lack 
of regional cooperation on trade facilitation measures constrains international 
integration with important trade blocks such as the EU, where a lot of growth 
could be generated. While multilateral trade agreements typically take a long 
time, progress could be made by starting with bilateral trade agreements with 
a number of countries. Further trade integration through and increased trade 
flows emerging from such agreements would boost FDI and jobs.
Improving the business climate to attract more FDI and create new jobs. 
To ensure that regional integration is successful, open trade policies need to be 
implemented in combination with strengthening the institutional framework 
supporting a dynamic business environment. The analyses in section 5.3 and 
Chapter 4 suggest that the business climate needs improving, including by 
simplifying procedures for issuing licenses and permits and reducing the time 
required to convert foreign exchange. Firm size analysis (section 5.5) indicates 
a less-skewed firm distribution in Uzbekistan than in advanced countries. This 
suggests the presence of constraints to firm growth, such as access to finance, 
access to global markets, and lack of good managerial practices, which prevent 
firms from fully exploiting scale economies. It would be helpful to document 
such obstacles by surveying enterprises. This would highlight the key problems 
related to business regulations and nontariff barriers. Deregulation would be 
the way forward to generate a dynamic business environment to allow firms to 
grow and create jobs.