Living in Uzbekistan

Uzbekistan lets you keep nearly all of what you earn, since tax here is unusually light. Pay sits around the middle of the world and the cost of an ordinary life sits with it, so that light touch is what turns a middling salary into a solid cushion. The difficulty is getting hired at all, since an outsider arriving without local footing will find few openings, and English alone will not carry you through a working day. The money works in your favor, but only once you can manage in the local language.

Uzbekistan is a country of emigration: about 2.1M Uzbeks live abroad, against roughly 1.1M foreign-born residents at home, though the diaspora has grown just 3% over the past decade. Those living abroad are concentrated in the post-Soviet space — Russia (778K), Kazakhstan, and Ukraine — while arrivals come overwhelmingly from Russia.