Bricks Over Machines: Capital Technological Composition, Reconstruction Versus Greenfield Expansion, and Regional Industrial Growth in Uzbekistan with Subnational Benchmarks from Kazakhstan

Equipment-embodied growth theory predicts that reallocating fixed-capital formation from civil structures toward machinery and plant modernization accelerates industrial output, yet high-investment transition regions routinely channel over half of capital outlays into construction-installation works. Assembling regional fixed-capital simplex panels across all 14 regions of Uzbekistan (2000–2025 for technological shares, N = 364; 2007–2025 for reproduction modes, N = 266; 2016–2025 for constant-price industrial value-added growth, N = 140) alongside boundary-harmonized regional benchmarks from Kazakhstan (2003–2026Q3), we evaluate compositional reallocation hypotheses using full-simplex two-way fixed-effects regressions and 9,999 null-imposed wild cluster bootstrap replications. Across all six primary specifications conditioning on real investment scale, real investment growth, employment growth, and residual simplex shares, shifting 10 percentage points from construction-installation works into machinery and equipment yields statistically unresolved contemporaneous (+0.74 percentage points; bootstrap p = 0.7025; 95% bootstrap interval [-1.66, 3.66]) and lagged (+0.56; bootstrap p = 0.3828) industrial growth associations that remain null under predetermined scale controls (+0.63; bootstrap p = 0.3710); a one-year-ahead dynamic association (+1.52; bootstrap p = 0.0319) does not survive six-horizon Holm correction (p = 0.1914), and omitting either Karakalpakstan's 10 region-years (-0.60; bootstrap p = 0.0812) or its single 2016 observation (-0.35; bootstrap p = 0.4017) reverses contemporaneous point estimates negative. On the capital-input margin, reallocating 10 percentage points from greenfield expansion to reconstruction and modernization is associated with a 4.35 percentage-point higher regional machinery share (bootstrap p = 0.0003; 5.75 percentage points with real-scale controls, bootstrap p = 0.0003), while Uzbek-Kazakh subnational comparisons show persistent civil-works dominance whose cross-sectional financing gradients depend on regional consolidation and own-funds scope.