ASSESSING AND REDUCING DISPARITIES IN THE SOCIO-ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT OF DISTRICTS: THE CASE OF BUKHARA REGION

Abstract

Reducing regional disparities is one of the key goals of the socio-economic policy of Uzbekistan. This article examines the disparities in the socio-economic development of the 11 districts and 2 cities of Bukhara region and proposes mechanisms for reducing them. The study proposes a system of 20 indicators in four blocks (economic, social, infrastructure and environmental) and a methodology based on min-max normalization, the entropy weight method, the coefficient of variation and the Theil index. The empirical calculation uses official 2024 data of the Bukhara Regional Department of Statistics on four indicators that are published for all districts: market services per capita, agricultural output per capita, the growth rate of market services, and the number of enterprises with foreign capital per 10,000 population. The integral index differs almost tenfold between the highest value (Bukhara city, 0,857) and the lowest (Shofirkon district, 0,087); the coefficient of variation of the index is 77,1%. The Theil index equals 0,208 for market services, 0,173 for agricultural output and 0,522 for enterprises with foreign capital, which shows that the strongest concentration is in foreign investment. Territories are divided into three groups by the level of the index, and a differentiated mechanism for reducing disparities is proposed, including specialization of districts, growth points, targeted allocation of investment and a monitoring system based on the integral index.