Valuation Risk of a Gold-Concentrated Reserve Portfolio: How Commodity Price Shocks Shape Uzbekistan's External Buffers

Gold rose from 71% to 90% of Uzbekistan's international reserves between January 2024 and October 2026. This thesis assesses how much of the recent reserve build-up is valuation rather than accumulation, how sensitive reserves are to gold and cotton price shocks, and how large the downside risk is to end-2027. An exact price–volume decomposition, a dynamic reserve-growth model for 2002–2025 and a conformally calibrated block-bootstrap forecast show that 76% of the USD 32.0 billion rise in reserves was a price effect, that reserve sensitivity to gold nearly doubled after 2017, and that the 5% Reserves-at-Risk for December 2027 is USD 49.7 billion.