Institutions, law, and resilience: the political economy of tourism-sector reform in Uzbekistan’s integration into the global economy

Can institutional and legal reform make a peripheral, resource-dependent economy more resilient to globalization while opening it to global markets? This Brief Research Report examines Uzbekistan, where a package of reforms enacted between 2016 and 2019—currency convertibility, visa liberalization, and a codified tourism law—coincided with more than a tripling of international tourist arrivals, from 2.0 million in 2016 to 6.75 million in 2019 and 8.2 million in 2024. We treat tourism as a sensitive indicator of cross-border friction and build a 2010–2024 panel for Uzbekistan and seven post-Soviet comparators. The panel combines World Bank overnight-visitor counts (to 2019) with national border-entry counts (2020–2024), with an explicit control for the resulting definitional break, and we apply four designs: interrupted time series (ITS), difference-in-differences with wild-cluster bootstrap inference, synthetic control (SC) with placebo-in-space tests, and fixed-effects panel regression analyses. Synthetic Uzbekistan tracks the pre-reform trajectory closely and then diverges. Over the consistently measured pre-pandemic window (2017–2019), actual arrivals exceed the counterfactual by 46%, the largest gap among the eight units (rank 1 of 8); the permutation p -value (≈ 0.13) is the smallest attainable with eight units but falls short of conventional significance, so we interpret the estimate as a large effect with limited statistical certainty. All six Worldwide Governance Indicators improve over time and correlate positively with arrivals ( r = 0.61–0.78), most strongly with long-haul non-Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) arrivals ( r = 0.80), which increased roughly sixfold. The difference-in-differences coefficient is positive but statistically indistinguishable from zero ( p = 0.75). Arrivals fell by 78% in 2020 and had fully recovered by 2024, a path comparable to Kazakhstan and Tajikistan. Because the reforms arrived as a collinear bundle, the evidence is consistent with an institutional-reform explanation without establishing it causally, and it points to administrative-regulatory rather than democratizing sources of resilience.

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