“This is not so quite essential and bid growth and if we convert this into dollars, in the case of 10 billion of GDP, it makes approximately 250 million US dollars. It should be noted that the 2016 budget deficit is 190 billion, i.e. it is much more than our economic growth and the anticipated debt, if we take it into account, in this case, the economic growth is a very small indicator for 2016,” – said economist Vilen Khachatryan, in response to the question of Aravot.am that the Bloomberg agency has published the list of the countries with poor economic indicators for 2016, in which the forecast of Armenia’s GDP is 2.5 percent, in other words, higher than the forecast by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the RA government – 2.2 percent.
We were interested to learn from Mr. Khachatryan whether the forecast of over 0.3 percent economic growth by Bloomberg will give anything to Armenia. the list published by Bloomberg agency indicated that among 93 countries, Azerbaijan ranks after Armenia, Estonia and Hungary. In this list, 2.4 percent of economic growth is forecast for Azerbaijan.
According to Vilen Khachatryan, as for the fact that Azerbaijan is behind us by 0.1 percent, the economist believes that this number will not give an essential difference. “In the same way, if we take the forecast of our government as a basis, Azerbaijan would be in a much better position, of course, the forecast of such countries like Syria and Ukraine is missing here, whose economic indicators are much worse and negative for the year 2016 in particular. In other words, from this standpoint, we are in a positive position, however, this is not the positive growth which will ensure development to our economy.”
As Vilen Khachatryan said, the illegal financial flows from Armenia in 2013 amounted to one billion and 800 million. “In other words, about 6-7 times more than our economic growth, and this means that Armenia’s economic growth though remains in number but actually in dollars, it goes out of our country, i.e. 90% of the population does not feel this growth.”
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Lusine BUDAGHYAN
