UZBEKISTAN'S POTENTIAL TO EXPAND IT SERVICES EXPORT: A COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE FROM THE CIS REGION

This article assesses Uzbekistan’s potential to expand information and communication technology (ICT) services exports by comparing its performance within a regional frame. The analysis benchmarks Uzbekistan, using World Bank balance-of-payments data, national statistics agencies, and sector-specific reports, against four post-Soviet economies that have pursued IT-export-led growth with different results (Kazakhstan, Georgia, Armenia, and Belarus). In addition to a descriptive comparison of export performances, this article builds estimated Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA) indices for each of these economies, highlights comparisons in theoretical literature, and examines the institutional frameworks of these countries’ export-promotion regimes. The analysis finds that although Uzbekistan’s ICT exports have increased rapidly in percentage terms — over-doubling from 2022 to 2024 — the estimated RCA of the country remains below the world average and below that of Armenia and Belarus. The country case studies show that Armenia, Georgia, and Kazakhstan have combined fiscal incentives with deliberate international-market access strategies over a decade, whereas Belarus’s experience reveals that a fifteen-year export success can erode within three years once a political risk arises. The conclusion of this article is that political predictability and regulatory policies are critical factors of ICT export performance, and it extracts policy implications for deepening Uzbekistan’s ICT export growth.