We will close 2017 approximately by 6 billion and 700 million, the Minister of Finances, Vardan Aramyan, had informed about this still in September. A few days have remained until the end of the year, by what indicators the budget will be summarized on December 31, how much will the state debt amount to? To the mentioned questions the Minister of Finances, Vardan Aramyan, replied: “For me not to make a mistake regarding the nominal indicators, I will answer by percent. We expect the public dept to account for 55.1% within GDP (gross domestic product) at the end of the year. Next year, without the Central Bank, the state debt in GDP will be around 50%. The domestic debt will amount to $1 billion and 260 million by nominal indicators.”
The Minister assured, if in the last 2 years the indicator of GDP-debt was growing by 7 percentage points, then in 2017 it has been half-reduced: “In 2018 we expect that GDP-debt indicator will begin decreasing.”
The President of the Republic of Armenia has announced in days: “A few years later we will reach a GDP with $10.000 per capita.”
Asked whether it is possible to reach the indicators represented by the President and when will we reach them, taking into consideration that our economy is largely dependent upon external factors, the Minister of Finances replied: “Simply to say and do it is not possible, we should work hard, and investments are required.”
With how many percents of economic growth will we sum up the year, the President had mentioned 6%, the Deputy Minister of Economic Development and Investments, Tigran Khachatryan had mentioned 7%, and other officials of the field have mentioned 4.5%? In response, the Minister of Finances explained: “4.5% economic growth is the long-term model. We have progressive number of economic activity (7.3%), as compared to what we expected, the economic growth will differ from activity. We had predicted 4.3%, but we are sure we will have 5.5%-6% growth.”
