Improving the Organizational-Economic Mechanism for the Effective Use of Human Resource Potential in Hotel Services: Evidence from Samarkand Region, Uzbekistan

Samarkand region has become the main gateway for international tourism in Uzbekistan, yet the people who serve this growth have received far less attention than hotel construction and visitor numbers. This study assesses how effectively the region uses the human resource potential of its accommodation and food service sector and proposes an improved organizational-economic mechanism for hotel services. The analysis draws on official open data of the Statistics Agency for 2017 to 2025 and combines labor productivity accounting, a growth decomposition, a location quotient and a two-way fixed effects panel model for the 14 regions of Uzbekistan (126 observations). Real output of the sector in Samarkand grew 6.1 times over the period, while employment rose by only 22.7 percent and the number of hotels almost tripled. Productivity gains explain 88.7 percent of real output growth, and output per worker rose from 39.7 to 79.3 percent of the national level. Despite this, the region remains the thirteenth of the fourteen regions in terms of output per worker, which would bring an additional 6.8 trillion soum to output per year in the sector. The estimates from the panel range from 0.33 to 0.39, implying that output elasticity of employment is less than one. This is echoed by wage signals, which saw the sector's wage drop from 90.3 to 79.8 percent of the national average over the same period (2023-2025). The results indicate that the issue of the constraint is not a matter of the number of workers but the quality of their use. The paper suggests a mechanism, which connects organizational levers, economic incentives and a monitoring system of key performance indicators with measurable targets for the regional authorities and hotel operators.