Why isn’t membership in the EU effective for Armenia and who is at fault? According to economist Karlen Mkrtchyan, we must find the answer within ourselves.
“Possible alternatives have been discussed often. When Armenia joined the EAEU in 2015, there were worries that the right path was to join the European Union and improve relations in that direction. But there is an important circumstance here. We need to look at the structure of goods that are exported from Armenia to the EAEU and to the EU. We offer mostly raw materials to the European Union. Our main partner in the EU is Germany, where we export approximately $445 million worth of goods to. And that is entirely copper and molybdenum. But we export ultimate consumer products to the EAEU, including wine, cognac, canned goods, fruits, vegetables… so, it is more important for us to increase the volume of ultimate consumer products that are exported, which the EU gave us the opportunity to do. It’s another issue entirely that we, in my opinion, are not making use of that opportunity. It is important for a country with as small of an economy as ours to enter into a market worth $150 million. But our economy and our business owners do not have the kind of competitive value yet to hold some sort of prestige in the market,” Karlen Khachatryan said.
According to Karlen Khachatryan, the fact that Armenia does not make use of its full potential is not because of Russia or the other EAEU member states, but because of Armenia itself. “We first need to work on making our products more competitive, which no one is initiating any steps towards doing. There is something else here too. We can say that a business should work on its own to have a high level of productivity, which would cause the wholesale price of the product to decrease, therefore making it more competitive. But the state’s policies towards improving the environment for business or procedures to carry out taxation policies are also important. Big steps have not been taking over the past three or four years in those directions.”
Ashot Hakobyan
