BAKU, Azerbaijan, June 27. President Shavkat Mirziyoyev reviewed a new digital platform designed to curb Uzbekistan’s shadow economy and strengthen prosecutorial oversight through artificial intelligence and real-time data analysis.
This was reflected in the statement by the press service of the Uzbek president.
The initiative comes as Uzbekistan intensifies efforts to reduce unregistered economic activity, which authorities say continues to undermine budget revenues, fair competition, and social protections despite significant progress in recent years.
According to the press service, the share of the non-observed economy has declined from 35% to 23% over the past two years. During the same period, authorities collected an additional 38 trillion Uzbek soms ($3.1 billion) in budget revenues, while the number of officially employed citizens surpassed 8.5 million and average reported wages approached 6.5 million soms (about $540).
However, the shadow economy remains substantial. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, its estimated volume reached 81.1 trillion soms (approximately $6.7 billion) in agriculture, 24.5 trillion soms (about $2 billion) in trade and services, 23.9 trillion soms (approximately $1.9 billion) in construction, and 6.7 trillion soms (about $577 million) in industry.
To address these challenges, the General Prosecutor’s Office has developed the pilot version of the “Shadow Economy Map” platform. The system integrates data from 16 government agencies and analyzes more than 100 risk indicators to identify illegal economic activity and estimate potential budget losses across sectors and regions.
The platform covers 22 major sectors of the economy, 85 economic activities, all 14 regions, and 208 districts and cities. Using real-time analytics, it automatically classifies sectors and territories into green, yellow, and red risk categories and detects violations such as unlicensed business operations, concealed turnover, undeclared employment, and underreported profits.
Authorities plan to use the platform to improve coordination among agencies responsible for combating the shadow economy while reducing the role of human discretion in oversight and enforcement.
Uzbekistan aims to cut the size of its shadow economy by half by 2030, increase the number of formally employed citizens to 14 million, and raise the share of cashless payments to 75%.
During the presentation, Mirziyoyev emphasized the importance of technological solutions in achieving these goals.
“When reducing the shadow economy, primary attention must be given to digitalization, strengthening data exchange, minimizing the human factor, and organizing targeted oversight,” he said.
The president instructed officials to integrate more than 70 information systems into the platform by Oct. 1, expand its coverage to all regions and sectors, and fully launch the system next year.
He also called for stronger prosecutorial oversight to ensure fair competition among businesses and increase the accountability of public officials responsible for reducing the scale of the shadow economy.
