“Armenia made further progress towards meeting the objectives of the Action Plan in the area of macroeconomic policy, poverty reduction and social cohesion, although there was limited action against high-level corruption. The current framework of cooperation between government and civil society is insufficient,” this is an excerpt from the 2012 European Neighborhood Policy (ENP) Country Progress Report. It was made public on March 20. www.aravot.am inquired during a conversation with specialists carrying out researches in the field of economy whether the progress asserted by the ENP report could be noticed in our country. Ara Galoyan, the economic commentator of 168 Hours, noted that even the government of the Republic of Armenia hadn’t officially stated about poverty reduction and stated: “It is hard for me to say on what grounds they give such an assessment. I haven’t seen even our officials formally say that poverty has been reduced. Therefore, I don’t think that it is serious information. Our officials do everything so that the economic growth exceeds inflation, but in reality, it is not so. I haven’t heard official statements about poverty reduction; on the contrary, the poverty rate that reduced to ¼ has become roughly 1/3 again due to the crisis.” In response to a question what such statements of the outside world aimed at, Mr. Galoyan said: “I don’t view the phenomena from the political perspective, but there may be political reasons too. Perhaps, that publication was made for forming a certain positive image of the economic leadership or for supporting it. For example, they may hint at the fact that the new political leader of Armenia is more suitable for them, or it is more pleasant to work with these economic leaders and stuff like that.” Tatul Manaseryan, an economist and the manager of the Alternative research center, agreed that there had been progress in terms of improving economic indexes, in particular, in recent years, but we hadn’t seen a desirable result in the area of poverty reduction. We inquired whether he didn’t see contradictions between the ENP report and the Armenian reality. T. Manseryan replied: “The problem is that economic growth cannot always be transformed into human progress. This has been a problem for the Republic of Armenia for a long time, since while elaborating models for the economic progress of the Republic of Armenia, liberals or neoliberals have given priority to improving indexes and not so much to improving indexes of human development, and that tendency is still there. I think that our main task should be to do everything necessary in the next few years so that economic growth transforms into
social development. The poverty increased, but over the past year there have been processes of overcoming poverty, and it is important to turn those into regularity. What is mentioned by the ENP report is based on the data we have given, and there is no contradiction or coercion here.”
Tatev HARUTYUNYAN
