Armenia’s Economy Suffering from Serious Diseases: Former Chair of Central Bank

Armenia today, in terms of economic policy, has reached a limit after which everyone — the authorities, the opposition, average citizens — realizes that we can’t live like this, said former chair of the Central Bank of Armenia Bagrat Asatryan at a public forum on inflation organized by the Civilitas Foundation today.

“Our country over the past ten years, refused to pursue economic policies and let the phenomena gravitate; at the start of the third millennium, a positive conjunction was established for Armenia’s economy, which essentially individuals made use of. The entire economic policy mechanism was aimed at receiving income in a short period of time. A false idea was put into circulation: that is the mechanism of calculating the real currency exchange rate. In a short period of time, our currency’s purchasing power was raised to a European level, but the difference is the remuneration of labor compared to Europe is ten times lower. This, in turn, opened the door to importing goods and closed the (without it) difficult conditions for developing our products,” he said.

In one example raised by Asatryan, between 2000–2003, the amount of Armenia’s exports rose by 228% whereas imports rose by 144%. During the few years following this period, until the crisis in 2008, exports rose by 154% while imports increased by 345%.

“Arriving at recent events, the crisis on top of that simply tore the face of our economy. It outright gave an assessment to the economy. The economy is suffering from serious diseases, which needs urgent treatment,” he said.