Abstract
Traditional composite regional industrial development indicators have been developed primarily for established market economies using subjective weighting and full compensation aggregation have a tendency to obscure the asymmetrical structural transformations found among transition economies. This research develops an improved methodology for evaluating regional development in transitional economies as well as a new five-dimensional composite index to measure it consisting of the following indicators: output dynamics, structural modernization, investment and capital rejuvenation, labour productivity, and the capacity for innovation, defined by an entropy weighted and noncompensatory geometrically aggregated score that will promote balanced performance. The study demonstrates the proposed methodology on a calibrated synthetic panel of five macro-regions in Uzbekistan during the years 2015-2024. The entropy weighted composite index has the greatest weight assigned to capacity for innovation of 0.393 and the least to investment at 0.110 which demonstrates notable variation in the discriminatory power of the various indicators. The overall composite index across Uzbekistan increases from 37.2 to 54.3 and the cross-regional coefficient of variation decreases from 0.254 to 0.197 which indicates an overall convergence of development between regions as the absolute gap between the leaders and laggards in development continues to widen.