NUROBOD, Uzbekistan -- Having spent most of his adult life working construction and other jobs in Russia, Rustam, 47, decided to set up a small business a short drive from the Uzbek city of Samarkand.

But after laying the floor of his roadside shop and sourcing refrigerators for the soft drinks he plans to sell to passing motorists, he ran out of funds to fill them.

"It was more expensive than I thought. Now I don't have money for products," he told RFE/RL, requesting that a pseudonym be used to protect his identity.

Rustam's shop-in-waiting is a good representation of Uzbekistan's economy, where despite greater opportunities for commerce in recent years, much of the country's population of 35 million has little to spare.

When Rustam lived and worked in the Russian Black Sea city of Sochi, he sent between $100 and $400 home to his elderly father every month.

In 2019, he was deported from Russia over a migration violation that he disputes as unfair and will now be unable to go back until the end of 2024, at the earliest.

At home, he struggles to earn the amount that he used to save.

By performing repair and renovation work in homes in Nurobod, the closest town to his village, he estimates that he can command only $15 per day.

In Samarkand, the figure rises to around $25 per day, but "about a quarter gets lost on the road" in payments for minibus taxis, he said, since he does not currently own a car.

Lately, he and his wife have been discussing the prospect of her traveling to Israel to work as a live-in nurse for the elderly, an arrangement that is in high demand in Samarkand Province.

There, she could earn around $2,000 per month as part of a five-year placement, said Rustam, who complained of local middlemen demanding over $15,000 up front to guarantee a place in the nursing and home-care sector in Israel.

"We got married in 1999, but we've lived together for just four years during that period," Rustam said. "You get used to it. This year, my son went to work in Russia for the first time."

Employment 'A Buyer's Market'

Last week, Samarkand hosted the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development's (EBRD) annual meeting -- the first time the event has been held in Uzbekistan since 2003.

President Shavkat Mirziyoev was keen to use the event to showcase his country's journey out of the isolation prized by its first president, the late Islam Karimov, whose desire for total control extended into the economy and left private enterprise in a straitjacket.

In his speech at the event, Mirziyoev stressed that "today's Uzbekistan is not yesterday's Uzbekistan," while hailing the symbolic significance of the "majestic" host city, which he described as being "located at the crossroads of the Great Silk Road…a center of trade, economic, cultural, scientific, and technological exchanges between the continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa, connecting east and west, north and south."

To be sure, Uzbekistan is a more dynamic economy these days.

In 2016, the year that Karimov died and Mirziyoev, his former prime minister, took over, Uzbekistan placed 166th out of 178 countries ranked in the Index of Economic Freedom published by the Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington.

This year, it ranked 109th out of 176 in the same index, reflecting a government-led drive to privatize, attract foreign investment, and trim an unwieldy regulatory system.

Yet for all that, the province that surrounds tourism hub Samarkand is a poor one, with its water-scarce Nurobod district a case in point.

Once called Sovietobod, the district's administrative center of less than 10,000 people some 80 kilometers from Samarkand used to enjoy the kind of Moscow-directed economic benefits enjoyed by uranium-producing towns across the Soviet Union.

But nowadays, average salaries for most of the population there are well below the national average, which Uzbekistan's state statistics committee claims to be around $300 per month.

On the sidelines of the three-day international conference at an upscale resort outside Samarkand, the EBRD's lead regional economist for Central Asia, Eric Livny, told RFE/RL that he remained "extremely optimistic" for Uzbekistan's economy, while acknowledging that low wages are a structural problem.

"You have a young population that is still growing, and there are not a lot of decent jobs to go around. That means there is a lot of downward pressure on wages. Certainly, in terms of unskilled work, it is a buyer's market, and this of course puts limits on consumption and demand," Livny said.

"But this is a snapshot. If you look at it as a moving picture, things are getting better," the economist continued.

"For instance, it gets hot in the summer [in Uzbekistan], and a lot of homes do not have air conditioners. But I'm told that one of the fastest-growing consumption items here is now air conditioners, so that would be one indicator [in terms of quality of life]. Retail of electronic equipment is also growing quickly," Livny said.

Hand To Mouth

For Uzbekistan-watchers, the key question is whether or not Mirziyoev and his government will be able to oversee improvements in living standards quickly enough, given an unpredictable external environment and a political system still lacking any competition.

The first years of his rule generated plenty of euphoria, with key reforms ending systemic forced labor in the cotton sector, making the som currency fully convertible, and lifting travel restrictions for scores of countries to grow the tourism industry.

But as the 65-year-old heads to an effectively uncontested snap July 9 vote looking for a new seven-year term in office, the challenges are piling up.

A press release on the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) latest mission to the country in November praised strong economic growth that it had projected at 6 percent for 2022.

But the IMF warned that "exceptional uncertainty lies ahead" with inflation -- at around 12 percent -- a rising threat.

A key support for consumption is remittances, which doubled last year, with Uzbekistan sending more citizens to Russia for work than any other country, including its smaller, even more remittance-dependent neighbors Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

Part of the reason for this growth was the strength of the Russian ruble, which bucked expectations of a collapse in the wake of sanctions imposed over Moscow's unprovoked, full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

But the Russian currency has now fallen by around one-third since it recorded a seven-year-high against the U.S. dollar last summer.

Several taxi drivers in Samarkand who spoke to RFE/RL cited uncertainty around the ruble as the main deterrent preventing them from returning to a country where nearly all of them had worked at some stage, and where migrants are now vulnerable to Moscow's military recruitment drive.

One driver, who said he hadn't yet tried the Russian labor market himself, was 25-year-old Daler, part of a group of men ferrying arrivals at Samarkand's train station to hotels in the city center.

As the youngest-born son in a family of six, it was his duty to stay behind and look after his parents, he explained, preferring not to use his surname.

Daler told RFE/RL that he had several friends working in St. Petersburg as bus drivers, who sped back home in September when Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the military mobilization to bolster the Kremlin's flagging war effort.

Their return and the arrival of planeloads of Russians of fighting age helped briefly push rental prices for two-room apartments from around $200 to $700, Daler claimed.

But when the mobilization drive appeared to be over, his friends were back on their way to Russia again.

"Because as a bus driver here you will make 200,000, maximum 250,000 soms ($17-$22 per day)," said Daler, bringing his hand to his mouth in an eating gesture. "It's enough to do this, but it's not enough to save anything."