From Capacity Expansion to System Coordination: An Audit and Evaluation Framework for Uzbekistan's Tourism Infrastructure Indicators

Tourism infrastructure is central to Uzbekistan’s economic diversification, but expanding hotels or telecommunications networks does not automatically translate into tourist flows and local economic value. This paper develops an indicator-based audit of five official tourism and connectivity indicators from the Integrated System of Open Statistical Information (SIAT) of Uzbekistan for 2015–2025: hotel establishments, bed capacity, visitors accommodated, and internet and mobile subscriptions per 100 inhabitants. Each indicator is classified as a stock or a flow and as telecommunications access or digital adoption in tourism, and growth rates are calculated separately for the expansion (2015–2019), shock (2019–2020) and recovery (2020–2025) periods. Between 2015 and 2025, hotel establishments increased from 661 to 2,257, beds from 34.9 thousand to 88.1 thousand, and internet subscriptions from 26.6 to 94.7 per 100 inhabitants. In 2020, visitors fell by 67.96% while accommodation capacity continued to grow, showing that installed capacity and actual utilization must be measured separately. Visitor numbers in 2025 were 54.3% above the 2019 level, equivalent to average annual growth of 7.5%, far below the 36.93% rate obtained from the 2020 low point. Subscription indicators capture population-level access, are bounded and cannot serve as proxies for digital adoption by tourism enterprises. The paper proposes policy monitoring indicators and an identification strategy for a future regional panel test of complementarity between physical capacity and digital connectivity.