From ministry to market: higher education expansion and state-designed marketization in Uzbekistan, 2015–2025

How does the state create a market where there once was a ministry? In this Brief Research Report we study the redrawing of the boundary between state and market in the higher education system of Uzbekistan, treating it as a problem of political economy, that is, as an authoritative public choice about allocation and about the design of a market. The legal basis of the process rests on Presidential Decree UP-5,847 of 8 October 2019, which approved the Concept for the Development of Higher Education until 2030, and on Presidential Resolution PQ-61 of 24 December 2021, which from 1 January 2022 granted financial autonomy to a designated list of state universities, including the right to set contract tuition within a ceiling of three times the base rate and to keep year-end balances. We combine a documented analysis of the legal framework with official annual statistics for 2015/16–2024/25 and with an explicitly exploratory, descriptive trend analysis of enrollment. Over this decade total tertiary enrollment grew from 264,300 to 1,432,800 students, or 5.4 times; the number of institutions rose from 69 to 222; and by January 2025 the share of students studying on a fee-paying (contract) basis had reached 88.8%. Segmented trend models describe an acceleration of annual log-growth from about 11% to about 28% under the reference specification. However, the sensitivity analysis shows that break placements in 2017/18 and 2018/19 fit somewhat better than 2019/20, while a 2021/22 placement fits worse, so we attribute the acceleration to the reform period as a whole, and above all to the access-expansion measures that started in 2017–2018, rather than to any single decree. We interpret the findings as a transformation of the developmental state rather than its retreat: the government has moved from direct financier to designer and regulator of a quasi-market whose entry, base price, and price ceiling it still controls.