“One should completely forget about saying that Serzh Sargsyan has fulfilled his promise,” Vahagn Khachatryan, the Armenian National Congress (ANC) member said this when www.aravot.am reminded him that President of the Republic of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan had promised in his election program, “Normalization of the economy should not impede formation and development of business, on the contrary, it should contribute to ensuring equal conditions, supporting development and reducing risks.”
Then V. Khachatryan went into detail: “The president has failed to fulfill that task. One doesn’t just make promises; one should create conditions for an atmosphere of competition. Whereas in our country, there is no competition not only in the economy, but also in the other fields. The Republican Party of Armenia (RPA) easily restored one party’s monopoly of the Soviet times, but in a worse way. There was a communist party, a state property and the state’s monopoly at that time. The Republican Party easily established one party’s monopoly led by the RPA, but it has private monopoly in all fields, which has led to the lack of competition. Reasons are political, since if there is competition, a middle class will be formed, which is economically independent, and one won’t be able to bribe those people with five thousand drams during elections. That is also the reason why poverty gradually increases.”
Economist Tatul Manaseryan doesn’t agree with this opinion and thinks that one shouldn’t go to extremes. He stated: “There are rather serious problems with business competition, and those are problems that cannot be solved overnight, as many countries’ experience shows. Let us note that there is certain progress, since it is hard to imagine that inspections could be conducted in any oligarch’s enterprises in the past, and abuse of office could be revealed there. This is progress. However, one shouldn’t be satisfied by that, since normalizing circulation of documentation is very important to prevent monopolies and abuse of power in the market and to be able to create equal conditions of competition. This is the reason that some representatives of big businesses don’t give bonds to small and medium enterprises, which will allow closing the circle.”
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Tatev HARUTYUNYAN
