Mr. Aghadjanov repeated the same thing that he had said many times; the USD price increase is artificial and there are no rules and regulations for that. The price of the USD continues to go down.. Domestic production and exports are also going down. As a result of such a tendency, in 2006, Armenia had an outflow of almost $500 million. “The deficit of foreign trade covers 30% of GDP. This is absurd. There isn’t any country like that in the world”, says the economist. According to him, as a result of cutting the capacities of domestic production down, the free space is being filled up by foreign producers, thus the domestic producers are pushed out of our domestic markets. Mr. Aghadjanov is angry about one fact; our authorities and the CB either don’t understand or don’t want to understand that the increase in Armenian national currency affects domestic producers. The economist says that the Russian president is very good from this view because he has ordered the corresponding bodies to take necessary steps to protect the rights of domestic producers suffering from the increase of the Russian ruble prices. Furthermore, they do this in spite of the fact that Russia has a positive balance of foreign trade and it exports more than imports.
As for Armenia, according to the economist, the CB likes to play with importers. This tendency is profitable only for importers, who may get super profits and get prepared for the coming elections. As for those that make the mentioned financial machinations Mr. Aghadjanov said the following, “The guys need money”. As for the fall of the exchange rate, he said that it depended on how much money the importers wanted to have and added that “it was simple theft”. On the basis of the abovementioned, E. Aghadjanov petitions people and journalists not to believe anything the CB says. Besides that, he petitioned to believe the official statistics more than the CB.
We don’t know whether the fact that Mr. Aghadjanov has worked as head of the statistical services plays a role here or not, but it is very strange that Aghadjanov petitions journalists to believe the statistical information because he does not believe it either.
We can’t disagree with the other things that Aghadjanov says, but the problem is the fact that we have heard about that a long time ago.
Generally, the situation of economy journalism is very interesting. When journalists write about the economy, some people accuse them of being non-professional. Journalists can’t make serious analyses because they don’t have enough time, the spaces for their articles are not enough to write that much and finally, they are journalists, not economists. This problem has been solved long ago; there are independent analyzers, analyzing centers and other organizations that conduct researches and inform the public about what they find with the help of journalists. As for journalists, they express different thoughts and opinions and try to present everything to their readers, but not their own approach and opinion on issues that they don’t know well.
As for Armenians, we differ from them much. Imagine that you aren’t an economist, but feel that there is something fishy in the economy, the implemented policy is not right and the announcements are not true. Whom can you ask for professional, objective and correct advice. I assure you that most journalists would mention the name of Edward Aghadjanov. They may say the name of Tatoul Manaseryan too, but he is more of a politician now than am economist. They hardly know other names.
There are other good specialists too but they either don’t want to appear in the mass media so as not to have problems with the authorities or journalists don’t know where they are. This is the reason why journalists only ask Aghadjanov. We respect E. Aghadjanov a lot and he is a good professional, but note: Mr. Aghadjanov is one-sided and is an oppositional economy speaker. He understands very well that he has gained much fame as an economist in Armenia and does not want to lose that. In order to do that, he has to periodically appear in Media and discuss things, even if he does not have anything new to say. Journalists gathered at the “Pastark” club to learn new things from Aghadjanov.
However, it seemed to me that that time had gone back. He was speaking about the same things that he had spoken in the same club a couple of months ago. The only thing that had changed was figures; there weren’t any new explanations, opinions and analyses. The journalists knew everything
After the press conference I was thinking about what new things I had learned from the famous economist. Every day one can read articles in newspapers telling about currency exchange rate changes and its results. Even though economical articles in newspapers are not professional enough, they are not worse than the analysis that Mr. Aghadjanov made yesterday. Many of us thought that we had gathered there to revise the things that we had already written about.
Maybe Mr. Aghadjanov thinks that if he says the same thing for many times, the CB may revise its policy. Not in the least. Besides that, after repeating the same thing for many times the society may get tired and be indifferent to these important issues. People get tired, and the CB does anything it wants.
I don’t want to criticize Mr. Aghadjanov at all. Furthermore, I express my gratitude to him for initiating such discussions and being brave enough to criticize the wrong policy of the existing authorities. On the one hand we are grateful to him, but on the other hand we understand that it would be better to have more economists like him in our society so as not to feel a lack of them. Every year Armenian universities prepare economists. Where are they? Are they doing something else other then their profession or do they all agree with the policy of the authorities? We need new ideas too, otherwise it seems that the only person that worries about our economical policy is Edward Aghadjanov, while young people are only interested in their personal careers.
That’s why Armenia is in the current situation. It’s bad for journalists like me because there are no other analyzers to talk to besides Edward Aghadjanov.