Credit Depth, Growth and Concentration in Bank Lending to Small Business in Uzbekistan: Evidence from Central Bank Reports (2016–2025) and A Cross-Country MSME Benchmark

Bank credit is the main external funding source for micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in Uzbekistan, yet, to our knowledge, the Central Bank’s annual-report series have not been combined with a cross-country benchmark. We derive four hypotheses from information-based theories of credit and test them descriptively with official data for 2016–2018 and 2023–2025 and the Asian Development Bank’s MSME database for up to 25 economies (2019–2024). MSME bank loans fell from 9.3% to 6.4% of GDP between 2019 and 2024 while the Caucasus and Central Asia average rose from 9.0% to 11.0%, although MSMEs produce 54% of GDP. Conditional on MSME output share, Uzbekistan’s loans/GDP ratio was on average 7.4 percentage points below the benchmark in 2019–2023 (cluster-bootstrap 95% CI: −16.6 to −0.2; negative in 97.6% of draws), a result that is robust to leave-one-out, alternative denominators and a log specification, whereas the output-share slope itself is imprecise. Newly issued MSME loans grew by 26.6% in 2024 and 42.0% in 2025, yet the stock of loans to entrepreneurs rose only 8% in 2025 because 78% of issuance was repaid within the year. Tashkent city’s share of regional lending rose from 35.6% to 38.6% in 2016–2018 with no evidence of beta-convergence. The non-performing loan ratio of entrepreneur loans fell from 4.4% to 3.2% in 2025. Published MSME credit-to-GDP figures differ by a factor of about two across sources; we propose a three-criterion reporting standard to resolve this.