The Human-Capital J-Curve: Short-Run Costs and Delayed Dividends of Uzbekistan's Leap to Universal Higher Education

In just eight years Uzbekistan moved from elite to universal access to higher education: the gross tertiary enrollment ratio rose from 8.6% in 2017 to 59.8% in 2025. This thesis asks when such a leap starts to pay off in economic growth and what it costs in the meantime. Using annual World Bank data for 1999–2025, we estimate finite distributed-lag and Almon polynomial distributed-lag models of per-capita GDP growth and test for a long-run relationship with the ARDL bounds test. The growth response follows a human-capital J-curve: a 10% rise in the enrollment ratio lowers per-capita growth by about 0.64 percentage points in the following year and raises it by about 0.38 points a year later, while the cumulative multiplier after two years is still negative (−3.14; p = 0.003). No cointegration is found, which is consistent with an economy that is still in transition. Lagged public spending on education is positively associated with growth (+3.40; p = 0.078), yet between 2017 and 2023 real public education spending per capita rose by only about half while the enrollment ratio rose 5.3-fold. Lifting and shortening the J-curve therefore depends on funding quality, not only quantity.