Designing a Sustainable Pension Reform Path for Uzbekistan: A Comparative Institutional Approach

Uzbekistan's pension reform must reconcile financial sustainability with adequate old-age protection. This article compares Sweden, the United States, Japan and Singapore through financing, coverage, demographic adjustment, adequacy and risk allocation, and assesses the transferability of their reform mechanisms to Uzbekistan. The analysis shows that Sweden offers lessons in contribution–benefit transparency and automatic adjustment; the United States in diversification and its distributional limits; Japan in linking pension parameters with older-worker employment; and Singapore in compulsory saving supported by strong administration. For Uzbekistan, direct replication is inappropriate. A sequenced hybrid architecture is proposed: minimum protection, a financially disciplined contributory PAYG pillar and a gradually strengthened funded component, supported by actuarial assessment, transparent indexation, broader contribution coverage and unified digital pension accounts.