Lending Expansion and Funding Pressure in Uzbekistan's State-Owned Banks: Evidence from 2017–2024

The aim of this article is to analyze lending intensity, funding pressure and accounting-based equity stability for a group of 13 Uzbek banks identified as state-owned in October 2020. Bank-level data on financial performance were used for the years 2017-2024. This allows the combination of an annual description of trends with a pairwise comparison of pre-reform (2017-2019) and reform-period (2020-2024) average values for each bank, as well as cross-bank analysis. The loan-to-assets ratio developed from a cohort annual average of 43.7% in 2017 to 61.5% in 2024, the pairwise development from 46.77% to 60.49% (p = 0.0008). The loan-to-deposit ratio remains high, although the increase in the pairwise comparison from 203.92% to 298.74% does not reach significance (p = 0.137). Equity-to-assets declines from 23.53% to 20.76%, without reaching significance at the 5% level (p = 0.065). This underlines the necessity to distinguish individual banks when using aggregate figures. The results support the need for differentiated asset/liability management and funding oversight. They cannot show that the reform caused these developments or that there is a regulatory shortage of liquidity.