DEVELOPING PRACTICAL RECOMMENDATIONS FOR ENHANCING UZBEKISTAN’S INTERNATIONAL IMAGE AND TOURISM COMPETITIVENESS: GAP DECOMPOSITION, INSTRUMENT COVERAGE, AND THE RANKING OF INTERVENTIONS BY IMPLEMENTATION DISTANCE

Affiliation
Tashkent State University of Economics image/svg+xml
Marketing jurnali — 2026-yil sentabr, 9-son

Abstract

Articles that develop practical recommendations normally list them. This one ranks them, using coefficients estimated in four companion studies on the same panels, and reports what the ranking exposes. Three constructs organise the work: gap decomposition, which locates the competitiveness shortfall along the chain from governance to revenue; instrument coverage, introduced here to record which links of that chain carry an estimated coefficient and which do not; and implementation distance, which scores how far each candidate intervention is from being executable. The decomposition finds that Uzbekistan is at the benchmark median on how tourists rate its heritage, at 99.6 per cent, and exactly at it on arrivals per signature event, at 100.0 per cent, while standing at 47.2 per cent of the median on articulated engagement and 39.0 per cent on receipts per arrival. The competitiveness problem is therefore not one of product quality. Of the seven links in the chain, six carry estimated coefficients and one does not, and the one that does not is the link from arrivals to receipts, where the measured gap is 2.615 billion USD per year. Ranking the quantifiable interventions gives a clear first choice: shortening every approval chain to two steps raises international attention by an estimated 30.5 per cent with no recurring cost, which is 51 per cent of the effect of doubling every site operating budget at none of its 2.02 million USD annual expense. The three interventions that can be quantified, taken together, are worth an estimated 251 million USD a year. That is one tenth of the gap for which no instrument exists. The article’s principal recommendation follows from that ratio rather than from any of the individual estimates.

Keywords

tourism competitiveness, nation image, policy prioritisation, instrument coverage, implementation distance, intervention ranking, Uzbekistan


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