In the conversation with Aravot.am, PAP MP and economist Michael Melkumyan, referring to the President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan’s speech at the 7th Congress of the Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs of Armenia held at the Government conference hall, in which Serzh Sargsyan assured that Armenia is making progress through the knowledge-based economies, he said that it requires increase of funding in sciences.
While, according to Mr. Melkumyan, today, 0.25 % of GDP goes to sciences, which is extremely low. “It should be at least a little higher of 1%, in the minimum. Wishing is one thing, specific facts and tendency are quite different thing.” According to the economist, for example, there is a specific field of information technology, but to what extent it produces result, according to Mr. Melkumyan, is not so visible. In his opinion, the president’s words do not refer to the current economic processes, rather than Serzh Sargsyan believes that our country should move towards this direction. “The president leads the vector towards it. Now, we have a very low labor productivity, there are 83 thousand employee in the industry and the labor productivity per employee amounts to one hundred dollars per day, which is very little. The situation is much more worse in agriculture.”
According to Michael Melkumyan, it does not matter who is the power today, who it be, willy-nilly, would go in that direction. “Because it is in the integration process, we have an export and import, therefore, we need to move by certain steps, the President says that if earlier we had a smaller budget, now, we have improved it, in other words, he wants to say that the more these indicators are improved, the more our direction and efficiency will increase. The President is right to say that investments tend to flow into economically profitable places with a favorable and safe investment climate. However, is not sufficient to attract new investments and we should strive to do better.” The RA President’s thought that with an example of Georgia, it can be showed that the main cause of devaluation of the dram in Armenia is not due to accession to the Eurasian Economic Union, Mr. Melkumyan said that he, too, had never announced that the cause of dram devaluation is due to accession to the Eurasian Economic Union. “EaEU still did not exist, but these processes had begun. I think that we would get a number of benefits associated with the EaEU. Our political position is that we are in favor of the Eurasian Economic Union, hence, the estimates that were told by the President of the Republic with regard to economic indicators is not subject to interpretation.”
Lusine BUDAGHYAN
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