Blockchain And The Future Of Public Finance Transparency In Transitional Economies: Comparative Insights From Uzbekistan, Estonia, Georgia, And Kazakhstan

Public finance transparency has become central to economic modernisation, fiscal accountability, and anti-corruption reform in transitional economies. With the emergence of distributed ledger technologies (DLTs), blockchain systems have been increasingly explored as instruments to improve auditability, reduce information asymmetry, and strengthen institutional trust between state, business, and society. This article develops a comparative analysis of blockchain adoption in public finance across four transitional or post-socialist economies: Uzbekistan, Estonia, Georgia, and Kazakhstan. Drawing on political economy frameworks, digital governance studies, and blockchain technical literature, it examines the potential and constraints of distributed ledger innovation in procurement, budgeting, treasury operations, registries, and asset disclosure systems. The analysis shows that blockchain adoption is not solely a technological issue but an institutional one, shaped by state capacity, bureaucratic incentives, regulatory ecosystems, and pre-existing digital infrastructure. While Estonia demonstrates advanced institutional integration of blockchain-based infrastructure, Georgia and Kazakhstan illustrate intermediate pathways of digital governance with selective blockchain pilots, and Uzbekistan represents an emerging adopter with rapid digital modernisation but slow blockchain deployment in fiscal functions. The article concludes that blockchain-based transparency reforms in transitional economies require a coordinated approach linking governance, data interoperability, legal reform, and administrative incentives rather than technology alone.

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