million people, or a staggering 25% of its labor force of 14.8 million. The U.S. Department of State also estimates that between three and five million Uzbek citizens of working age live outside Uzbekistan. After 2016 Uzbekistan has admitted the lack of higher education offers in the country to support its labor market needs. Since 2016 a number of higher educational providers have started operating in Uzbekistan, including in cooperation with foreign universities. Moreover, private higher education providers started to emerge on the market to provide students with necessary skills, knowledge and competencies required on the labor market. One of the private universities in Tashkent TEAM University aims at development of skills necessary for starting entrepreneurial activities, thus contributing to development of businesses and private enterprises. Prices and monetary policy Uzbekistan experienced galloping inflation of around 1000% per year immediately after independence (1992–1994). Stabilization efforts implemented with active guidance from the International Monetary Fund rapidly paid off, as inflation rates were brought down to 50% in 1997 and then to 22% in 2002. Since 2003 annual inflation rates averaged less than 10%. The severe inflationary pressures that characterized the early years of independence inevitably led to a dramatic depreciation of the national currency. The exchange rate of Uzbekistan's first currency, the "notional" rouble inherited from the Soviet period and its successor, the transient "coupon soum" introduced in November 1993 in a ratio of 1:1 to the rouble, went up from 100 roubles/US$ in the early 1992 to 3,627 roubles (or coupon soum) in mid-April 1994. On July 1, 1994 the "coupon soum" was replaced with the permanent new Uzbek soum (UZS) in a ratio of 1000:1, and the starting exchange rate for the new national currency was set at 7 soum/US$, implying an almost two-fold depreciation since mid-April. Within the first six months, between July and December 1994, the national currency depreciated further to 25 soum/US$ and continued depreciating at a fast clip until December 2002, when the exchange rate had reached 969 soum/US$, i.e., 138 times the starting exchange rate eight and a half years earlier or nearly 10,000 times the exchange rate in early 1992, soon after the declaration of independence. Then the depreciation of the soum virtually stopped in response to the government's stabilization program, which at the same time dramatically reduced the inflation rates. During the four years that followed (2003–2007) the exchange rate of the