Gold and Cotton Price Shocks, Exports and International Reserves in a Gold-Dependent Economy: Evidence from Uzbekistan

Uzbekistan holds one of the most gold-intensive reserve portfolios in the world: monetary gold rose from 71% of official reserves in January 2024 to 90% in October 2026, and gold accounted for 21–33% of exports in 2021–2025. This paper quantifies how world gold and cotton price shocks transmit to the country's exports and international reserves and provides calibrated probabilistic forecasts of reserves to end-2027. Using official monthly export data by SITC section (2021–2026), Central Bank reserve statistics and IMF and World Bank price series, we combine an exact price–volume decomposition of reserves, a dynamic reserve-growth regression for 2002–2025, an ARDL model of textile exports and a stationary block-bootstrap simulation with split-conformal calibration. Price valuation explains 76% of the USD 32.0 billion increase in reserves between January 2024 and October 2026, and the short-run elasticity of reserves to the gold price nearly doubled after 2017 (from 0.49 to 0.90). The dynamic model outperforms an autoregressive benchmark out of sample (RMSE 0.068 vs 0.140; Diebold–Mariano −2.22). Gold export volumes respond to the Central Bank's allocation between sales and accumulation rather than to prices, whereas cotton prices pass through to textile exports with a long-run elasticity of 0.28. The calibrated 90% interval for reserves at end-2027 is USD 49.7–105.8 billion around a median of 71.6 billion; a 20% gold price fall would reduce reserves by about USD 12 billion. The results call for explicit gold-concentration limits and a rules-based allocation framework for domestic gold purchases.