Image from Kommersant.uz
Over the last year, the number of employees receiving a high salary in Uzbekistan has almost doubled, a report from the country’s finance ministry has revealed.
While in January 2019, 2.4% of employees, or 87,300 people, in the country received a monthly salary of over 5.5m Som ($575), in November of the same year, this figure rose to 4.3%, or over 175,000 people. The same growth in this period was shown in the category of salaries from 4m Soms ($418) to 5.5m Soms – from 2.6% to 4.3%.
The proportion of workers earning from 2m Soms ($210) to 4m Soms rose from 16.8% (613,500 people) to 20% (806,500 people). A small increase was shown in the number of citizens whose salaries consisted of between 1m Soms ($105) and 2m Soms. In January of last year this figure came in at 27.5% (1m people) and increased by November to 27.7% (1.1m people).
Over the same ten-month period, the category of workers receiving less than 1m Soms fell from 50.7% (1.8m people) to 43.6% (over 1.7m people).
The ministry noted that personal income tax receipts in 2019 nearly doubled – from 6.4 trillion Soms ($669m) to 12.7 trillion Soms ($1.3bn). The rise was facilitated by the introduction of a flat rate for income tax, lowering the unified social payment rate and decreasing deductions from mandatory individual social security accounts, as well as widening the tax base by putting an end to tax privileges for judges, prosecutors, customs officials and other state security employees.
In 2020, the finance ministry anticipates a further increase in income tax receipts to 16.1 trillion Soms ($1.6bn), or a growth of 26.8%, in part by transferring small-scale self-employed taxpayers currently subject to a fixed tax on their commercial activities to the system for personal income tax payments.
In October last year, the State Committee on Statistics of Uzbekistan announced that over the first nine months of 2019, the average pre-tax salary in the country had risen by over 30% compared to the same period in 2018 and amounted to 2.2m Soms ($233). The highest tempo of growth was seen in the accommodation and catering sectors – around 40%, while the salaries of those engaged in IT and communications, construction and industry increased more slowly than others – below 25%.
