Throughout the period under study Uzbekistan has been ruled by an old-left executive in a nonpolarized autocracy. As expected, Uzbekistan pursued a mix of inconsistent gradual policies emphasizing state-led development, slow privatization, and vast state intervention in the economy to support the executive's core constituency in state-owned industry and agriculture. Fifteen years into the transformation, land was state owned, companies producing the largest export commodities, cotton and gold, were largely in state hands, protection against foreign goods was vast, and economic policy was widely perceived to be subject to arbitrary changes. High market prices for gold and cotton in the first half of the 1990s helped to prop the Uzbek economy and provide fairly generous transfers, but ultimately, the country's inconsistent gradual policies failed to generate sufficient growth to maintain high levels of transfers.