Benchmarking Electrotechnical Industry Competitiveness Across Development Stages: A DEA and Global Value Chain Analysis of Germany, China, South Korea, Turkey, and Uzbekistan

This study benchmarks the competitiveness of the electrotechnical industry across five countries representing distinct stages of industrial development: Germany (advanced), South Korea (innovation-driven late industrializer), China (scale-intensive emerging power), Turkey (middle-income industrializer), and Uzbekistan (early-stage transition economy). Employing Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to measure relative technical efficiency and Global Value Chain (GVC) framework analysis to map upgrading trajectories, the study identifies the efficiency gaps that separate Uzbekistan from its benchmark peers and delineates a phased upgrading pathway. DEA results indicate that Uzbekistan’s electrotechnical sector operates at 41.8% technical efficiency relative to the frontier defined by Germany, with the efficiency gap attributable primarily to pure technical inefficiency (PTE = 0.492) rather than scale inefficiency (SE = 0.850). GVC analysis reveals that Uzbekistan occupies a backward-integrated assembly position, comparable to China in the 1985–1995 period and Turkey in the 1990s. A PESTEL analysis contextualizes these findings within Uzbekistan’s macroeconomic and institutional environment. The study proposes a four-phase upgrading roadmap—from backward assembly through process upgrading, product upgrading, and functional upgrading—calibrated to the empirical benchmarks derived from the reference countries’ historical trajectories.