The election of Shavkat Mirziyoyev as president in December 2016 provided and massive and long-awaited change for Uzbekistan. It drew a welcome line under the regime of Islam Karimov who had guided the country to independence in the early 1990s but whose isolationist stance had seen the land-locked Central Asian state overtaken by peers like Kazakhstan.
Under Mirziyoyev, the country has opened up financially to the world. It sold its first international sovereign bond last year and a pipeline of initial public offerings from domestic companies has been growing. With a privatisation programme kicked into gear, some of the crown jewels of the Uzbek economy are even expected to...
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