Uzbekistan targets growth with expansion to its capital
CNN
New Tashkent will include university campuses, and purpose-built tourism and innovation areas.
About five million people live and work in Uzbekistan’s capital, Tashkent, making it the largest city in the country, and one of the most populous cities in Central Asia. It’s about to get a lot bigger. A 20,000-hectare site (almost 50,000 acres) immediately east of its current boundaries is being developed to transform the city into a major metropolis. The capital expansion, dubbed New Tashkent, could play an important role in helping the country create new jobs, draw investment and boost its economy. “It will be a hub for a lot of new economic activities,” Christine P. Chan, Principal Urban Development Specialist at the Asian Development Bank (ADB), told CNN. In 2017, Uzbekistan’s new president Shavkat Mirziyoyev launched an ambitious economic and social reform program. The country hopes to halve its poverty rate by 2026 and become an upper-middle-income economy by 2030, increasing the per capita GPD from $2,200 to $4,000. As part of that plan, it’s set a target of a 60% rate of urbanization by 2030, up from just over 50%. Uzbekistan’s major industries include agriculture, mining, textiles, machinery and food processing. It’s the world’s sixth largest producer of cotton and the ninth largest producer of gold. But it faces challenges. The country “remains largely dependent on trade with regional neighbors,” according to the US state department, and unemployment is at around 6%.
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