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This chapter is the first study that carefully documents higher education (HE) reforms in Uzbekistan since the demise of the former Soviet Union. It analyses evolution of the sector with clear emphasis on government policy and its impact on changing the country’s higher education landscape since independence. The study highlights complex interactions between the distinct pre- and post-independence contexts, policy legislation and its implementation on the one hand, and the demands of the new market-based economic system and the requirements of building and strengthening state institutions to support the transition process on the other hand. The paper will show why the country’s peculiar ‘strictly top-down’ approach to reforms has not been successful in improving a number of key areas including access to higher education, and human as well as physical capacities of higher education institutions which ultimately determine the quality of higher education provisioning.

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Credit shortages are widely thought to explain the output contraction in former Soviet Union (FSU) countries during the 1990s. It is argued here that these shortages were the result of an ahistorical approach to policymaking which ignored the time needed for the establishment and further development of money, banking, and nonbanking financial institutions. Starting from Chick’s stages-of-banking-development framework, we examine the experience of the FSU economies in transition from central planning. We then develop a fivephase framework to characterize the process of banking development required for them to reach stage two of Chick’s framework, where bank liabilities are accepted as money