Uzbekistan is world’s No. 2 for STEM graduates but only 99th for R&D spending
Uzbekistan has one of the world’s highest proportions of science and engineering graduates, but it ranks near the bottom of the global research spending chart. What went wrong with the nation’s innovation profile?
According to the 2026 Global Innovation Index compiled by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), Uzbekistan ranks second in the world for science and engineering graduates, with STEM fields accounting for 36.8% of total graduates. However, the country spends only 0.1% of GDP on research and development, ranking 99th out of 139 economies.
The WIPO is a UN agency responsible for intellectual property, and its annual Global Innovation Index (GII) compares economies based on indicators such as education, research, infrastructure, finance, technology, and innovation outputs.
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Plenty of STEM graduates, little research
In this year’s edition of the GII, Uzbekistan performs reasonably well on various educational indicators. Education expenditures account for 5.5% of GDP, ranking 25th globally, while tertiary education as a whole ranks 27th.
Research is significantly weaker: Uzbekistan has approximately 640 researchers per million people, ranking 69th, and its R&D spending is only 0.1% of GDP. According to WIPO’s methodology, its three largest corporate R&D investors spend virtually nothing.
The weakness becomes even more apparent when we consider research output. Uzbekistan ranks 103rd in scientific and technical articles relative to its GDP, 107th in the H-index of citable documents, and 101st in international Patent Cooperation Treaty applications.
However, domestic inventive activity is not absent: Uzbekistan ranks 43rd in patents filed by residents and an unusually strong 14th in utility models, a type of protection commonly used for incremental technical inventions.
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Uzbekistan punches above its income level
The weak R&D numbers have not stopped Uzbekistan climbing the overall innovation ranking.
The country climbed two places to 77th in the world in 2026, and it has now performed above what WIPO would expect from an economy at its stage of development for five years in a row.
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This mismatch is also noticeable in the startup economy. Uzbekistan’s venture market has grown rapidly, but funding remains concentrated in the early stages, and successful exits are still rare.
