Modelling tourist flows to Uzbekistan: a gravity approach
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This paper estimates the determinants of inbound tourist flows to Uzbekistan using a
2023 cross-section of 18 origin countries. Nested log-linear OLS specifications, HC3 robust standard
errors and Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood are employed. The contribution does not lie in ap-
plying the gravity model itself, which is well established in tourism research, but in identifying an
Uzbekistan-specific regional concentration effect: the largest origin markets are simultaneously geo-
graphically close, contiguous, visa-free and culturally connected. Consequently, the baseline distance
elasticity of -2.2 captures a composite spatial-regional effect and becomes unstable once controls are
introduced. Of the six hypotheses, the negative distance effect is supported only in the baseline
model, while cultural and social proximity is positively significant in PPML. Income, common bor-
der, visa-free access and direct flights are not statistically supported because of multicollinearity and
insufficient variation. Comparison with prior tourism studies suggests that these deviations reflect
the structure of the Uzbekistan sample rather than a rejection of general tourism-demand mecha-
nisms. A testable digital-proximity extension and a two-stage framework linking predicted arrivals
to tourism receipts and GDP effects are proposed.
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