Publication type
Journal Article
Author
Publication date
October 15, 2026
Summary:
Script reforms are common nation-building tools, yet rigorous evidence on their effects is scarce. This paper examines Uzbekistan's transition from Cyrillic to Latin script, mandated in 1993 and implemented in schools from 1996. I study heterogeneous effects across initial conditions using a difference-in-differences design that exploits variation in exposure across birth cohorts and pre-reform district characteristics. The reform had no significant average effect on literacy, but it generated substantial heterogeneity: districts with lower baseline literacy gained 0.09 standard deviations per standard deviation of the baseline literacy gap, whereas districts with more Russian speakers experienced relative losses of about 0.05 standard deviations. These patterns reveal the redistributive politics of nation-building. The reform also reshaped labour markets: Latin-exposed cohorts moved away from state employment and, less sharply, from entrepreneurship. The same cohorts became more likely to express intolerance towards speakers of other languages, an effect specific to the linguistic margin. The findings suggest that script reforms do not deliver aggregate literacy improvements but have significant distributional consequences and may heighten ethnolinguistic divisions.
Published in
Economics of Transition and Institutional Change
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1111/ecot.70052
ISSN
25776983
Subjects
Notes
© 2026 The Author(s). Economics of Transition and Institutional Change published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
Online Early
Open Access
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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