Policy Brief_Uzbekistan Towards 2030: A New Social Protection Model f bunxjnse pwvc en 9 | Seite 8

Uzbekistan Towards 2030: A New Social Protection Model for a Changing Economy and Society
tion and healthcare systems and social programs to provide housing and other
kinds of non-monetary aid.
The key factor in building a new social protection model will be an effective
employment policy. According to the priorities of the long-term economic and
social development plan, it is important to generate productive employment
in industries that can have significant multiplier effects in associated indus-
tries and the economy as a whole. This will generate more stable and higher
incomes, contribute to improvements in the quality of human capital and in-
crease state budget revenues (through a broadening of the tax base), which
then can be redistributed to finance social protection measures.
According to recent estimates , the industries that could have the largest
multiplier effects on output, employment and value added include chemical
industries (including oil- and gas-related chemical industries), machine build-
ing, transportation and communication services. For this reason it is important
to create the enabling environment that would contribute to development of
these industries.
Overall, the design of various elements of the social protection system will
have to be adapted and carefully sequenced with new emerging patterns of
employment and income structures.
Social Protection Towards 2030:
How to Create Opportunities
in a Changing Economy and Society
The education structure
needs to be transformed
by expanding the share of
engineering and technical
specialties
To create opportunities for the population to realize their social rights and
provide for social stability during the transformation it is important to imple-
ment a number of key measures, outlined below.
1) Organize large-scale training and retraining programs for spe-
cialists to ensure the alignment of available skills with the demands of the
labor market. Taking into account the expected rapid increase in productive
employment, flexible retraining programs quickly reacting to a changing de-
mand, are important to prepare people for more highly skilled jobs. For the
next 5-7 years, assuming rapid employment growth and the fact that the skill
sets of around 50% of specialists do not meet the demands of the labor mar-
ket, there is a need to retrain an average of 50,000 people per year during the
first three years and 100,000 people per year during subsequent years. The
annual cost of financing such programs would amount to 52 billion soum dur-
ing the first three years and 104 billion soum per year (in current prices) during
subsequent years.
To finance these retraining programs, contributions to the Employment
fund need to be increased gradually from 0.1% to 5% of wages by 2017. Such
an increase in contributions to the Employment fund could be achieved with-
out an increase in the tax wedge through the expected expansion of formal
employment and the corresponding growth of pension fund revenues.
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The publication reflects opinions and views of the working group, which may not coincide with
the official point of view of the Center for Economic Research or UNDP.
© Сenter for Economic Research, 2014 (www.cer.uz)
© UNDP, 2014 (www.undp.org)
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