Poverty Reduction and Social Protection in Uzbekistan: A Narrative Review of Results, Mechanisms and Limits from the Economic Security Perspective

Poverty is a source of vulnerability for households, and a large poor population weakens the economic security of a state. This article is a narrative review of how poverty fell in Uzbekistan between 2021 and 2025 and of the role that social protection played in this process. Using the World Bank's Poverty and Equity Assessment (presented in September 2026), official releases of the President's office and the government, and analyses of the Center for Economic Research and Reforms (CERR) for 2021–2026, it shows that the national poverty rate fell from 17.0% to 5.8%, that about 3.7 million people left poverty, and that employment and wage growth accounted for 9.0 of the 11.2 percentage points of the decline, against 2.0 points for the social insurance system. The article also describes the reorganisation of social assistance around a unified register, which became the Social Registry on 1 February 2026. The sources reviewed do not publish microdata, do not state which poverty line underlies every figure, and do not evaluate individual programmes, so the article does not estimate the causal effect of any benefit. Three working hypotheses are checked descriptively, a conceptual framework linking poverty reduction to economic security is proposed, and recommendations and a design for further empirical work are given.