Publication Details
Abstract
Small business is routinely credited with carrying the labour market of Uzbekistan, since the sector accounts for roughly three quarters of total employment. This study argues that such share-based reasoning conflates two distinct properties — the stock of jobs a sector holds and its marginal capacity to generate new ones — and that doing so produces misleading policy conclusions. To separate them, the paper introduces the marginal contribution to employment growth (MCE) coefficient, which expresses the change in sectoral employment as a proportion of the change in economy-wide employment over the same interval. The coefficient is applied to official data of the National Statistics Committee of the Republic of Uzbekistan for 2015–2024, complemented by segmented trend estimation, a multiple regression of the sectoral employment share on value-added and investment shares, and a three-scenario projection to 2030. The results reveal a pronounced divergence. While small business held 74.9 per cent of total employment, it accounted for only 34.5 per cent of the employment increment generated over 2015–2024 — less than half its stock share. By stage, the coefficient fell from 80.8 per cent in 2015–2017 to −18.8 per cent in 2018–2021, before recovering to 73.9 per cent in 2022–2024. Trend estimation confirms that the series is not homogeneous: a linear trend fitted to the full period is uninformative (R² = 0.011), whereas the same specification fitted to the post-pandemic recovery segment explains 96.3 per cent of the variation (R² = 0.963). The findings support reorienting employment policy from coverage targets towards measured net job creation, and offer a low-data-requirement diagnostic transferable to economies where firm-level job-flow statistics are unavailable.