THE IMPACT OF BUILDING SMART CITIES ON NATIONAL AND REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT

The transition toward smart urban governance has become one of the defining structural trends of twenty-first-century development policy. This article examines the channels through which smart city construction affects national and regional development outcomes, drawing on international empirical evidence and the case of Uzbekistan's “Digital Uzbekistan — 2030” strategy. Using a comparative document-analysis methodology, the study derives four principal transmission channels — productivity and innovation, agglomeration spillover, public investment efficiency, and institutional quality — and evaluates their relative weight using comparative data from the IMD Smart City Index and national digital-economy statistics. The results show that smart city projects generate measurable, though geographically uneven, contributions to gross regional product, employment structure, and the quality of public administration; the discussion situates these results within the Uzbek policy context and concludes that the net effect on inter-regional disparities depends on the design of accompanying fiscal and investment policy.