Regional Wage Divergence and Agricultural Employment Structure in Uzbekistan: Evidence from a 2017–2024 Territorial Panel

Uzbekistan has seen rapid growth in wages since 2017 with labor leaving agriculture. However, national level statistics can mask regional differences. This study builds a balanced panel from the SIAT system of the National Statistics Committee for the years 2017 to 2024. The panel includes nominal wages, agricultural employment, GRP per capita, and income per capita. The research study uses wage dispersion measures along with beta convergence, rank persistence and two-way fixed-effects methods to analyze the data. SIAT data shows that average regional wages increased from 1.21 million soums to 3.90 million soums. However, the standard deviation of log wages (34.3%) and the ratio of the maximum to minimum value (from 1.73 to 2.27) also showed an increase. This increase was particularly pronounced in two regions. If we exclude the Tashkent city data, log dispersion decreased by 4.9 percent. If we exclude data from Tashkent city and Navoi, log dispersion would decrease by 20.6 percent. Rank persistence was also evident (Spearman's rho was 0.82). In 2024, we see a marginal increase in agricultural employment, and a corresponding decrease in regional wages of 2.2 percent. When we include region and year fixed effects, we no longer see this relationship. The results indicate a two-speed transformation with some high-productivity centers, rather than widespread regional divergence, and suggest combining agricultural productivity upgrading with non-farm job creation and place-based support for lagging territories.

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