Economic Determinants of Tourist Flows From Central Asian Countries to Uzbekistan: An Econometric Analysis Based on a Panel Gravity Model

This paper examines the economic determinants of tourist arrivals in Uzbekistan from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan (CA4), which together accounted for 77.3% of the 11.7 million tourist arrivals recorded in 2025. Using official country-level arrival data for 25 source markets over 2018–2025, combined with World Bank and IMF macroeconomic data, we estimate a structural gravity model by Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood (PPML) with origin and year fixed effects. The distance elasticity is −1.58; a common border multiplies tourist flows by 4.4 and shared former-USSR membership by 12.4. The origin-income elasticity equals 1.17 for distant markets but is statistically indistinguishable from zero for the CA4, which is consistent with the visiting-friends-and-relatives (VFR) nature of regional travel. A visa-free regime raised CA4 arrivals by about 146%. The results are robust across six alternative specifications. The findings imply that border-crossing infrastructure, entry-regime liberalisation and spending per visit, rather than neighbours' income growth, are the main policy levers for Central Asian tourism to Uzbekistan.