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Despite its potential as an emerging market for Islamic financial services, Uzbekistan has lagged in legislative support. This study aims to evaluate the feasibility of introducing an Islamic capital market (ICM) in Uzbekistan, preceding a broader industry establishment.

The authors begin by assessing Islamic finance literacy and the potential demand for ICMs in Uzbekistan. The authors then scrutinize Uzbekistan’s capital market legislation and its readiness. This analysis uses primary data, including surveys and interviews, and secondary data from literature and financial legislation.

This study highlights a significant demand for ICMs, despite low Islamic finance awareness in Uzbekistan. Presently, Uzbekistan’s capital market development is lacking, with regulations not yet suitable for ICMs. As a result, legal and operational enhancements are needed.

The authors provide essential policy recommendations for authorities and practitioners to facilitate the effective launch of ICMs and enhance Uzbekistan’s capital market stature.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study offering an in-depth analysis of the potential and feasibility of ICMs in Uzbekistan.

Uzbekistan, a former Soviet Union state whose population is 96% Muslim, is aiming to penetrate the global halal market. Since 2016, its government has been committed to establishing a halal economy, purportedly comprising halal product exports and inbound halal tourism services. Given that a conducive halal ecosystem is a critical condition for creating and sustaining a viable halal economy, the current condition of the halal industry in the country must be diagnosed. For this purpose, we developed a diagnostic framework based on the halal principles and the Viable System Model (VSM) to identify the existing players and stakeholders in the halal industry ecosystem in Uzbekistan and their respective roles and functions, as well as the information flows amongst them.

The study utilised the qualitative methodology with the data gathered mainly from in-depth interviews with industry experts and consumers in Uzbekistan.

The findings revealed that the country has considerable potential to develop its halal tourism market due to its beautiful landscape, rich history and cultural heritage, which is supported by a full-fledged development policy. Uzbekistan's industrial sector exhibits substantial readiness to serve the Muslim market; however, the country lacks a specific policy for the development of the halal manufacturing export industry.

Our findings generate emergent themes that are relevant to the operations and future viability of halal industry of a Muslim country in a transitioning economy. These emerging themes further strengthened existing conceptualisation of the Viable System Model in terms of the elements of the environment and the function of policymaking in contributing toward a system's viability. Implications of the findings and suggestions for future research are also provided.

This paper aims to scrutinize the value of houses explained by their location in Central Asia’s largest city – Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. The city was completely rebuilt after a devastating earthquake of 1961 and since the country was under the centrally planned regime, houses followed a common standard and style. This allows minimizing the error from omitting possible intrinsic characteristics in a hedonic model, while measuring the impact of location on housing values.

This study uses unique data on housing values and characteristics harvested from classified adverts. This study deliberately focused on data between 2013 and 2016, when Uzbekistan was characterized as hesitant in economic reforms. Therefore, residential buildings constructed during the Former Soviet Union dominated all parts of the city in the analysis period. The results are based on the hedonic pricing model.

The results suggest that locational characteristics are relatively more important than intrinsic characteristics. This study finds that proximity to the city center and access to subway stations significantly increase housing values. The opposite is true for the case of proximity to a wastewater treatment plant. Surprisingly, on the contrary to the authors’ expectations access to a park has no economically significant impact on housing values. The results, therefore, call for an integrated approach for city planning.

The first and most important contribution of this study to the field of housing economics is that it is the first study done for Uzbekistan, the most populated Central Asian country, and it is a case study for other Central Asian countries. The second contribution of the study is that, after a long and meticulous study, the determinants of housing prices were analyzed by taking into account all possible intrinsic and extrinsic properties of houses with the similar characteristics, over a unique data set created from approximately 18,000 observations from classified pages of a major newspaper published every Thursday in Tashkent City. The final contribution of the study is that it offers new perspectives and policy recommendations to the housing market actors in Uzbekistan.