It seems that in coming future we are going to quite often listen to the expression, “years of coldness and darkness”. But the fact that the foreigners have started to speak about that especially if they were not in Armenia during those years, is a real novelty for us. A few days ago the “Business Week” online media agency has placed an article about Armenia online with a sound title “Armenia a Model for Developing Nations”. The author of the article, Adam Cardais, started the article with the following sentence, “Economic reform and investment by Armenian expatriates have helped the country boost GDP by more than 10% a year for a decade.” It is not very truthful even if we consider that the dual-digit growth started in 2001 was 9.6% and if we add the opportunities of the dual-digit economic growth of this year we will have “tiger-like” leaps within maximum 7 years. According to the author to appreciate just how far Armenia has come in the last 15 years, it helps to imagine yourself living through an Armenian winter in the early 1990s. “It’s the middle of January, it’s five degrees below zero, and your family and you have only two hours of electricity a day,” says the author and adds that Armenia was able to overcome those abstruse conditions and deserve the title of the World Bank, “Caucasian Tiger.” GDP has increased more than 10 percent a year for a decade largely thanks to robust investment in a booming construction industry. He also speaks about international monetary transfers, which come to Armenia, which doesn’t enable to consider Armenia as a model state. But all this is not a problem to speak about our economy with inspiration. Given the fact that it doesn’t have natural resources, its growth is quite impressive," says Heike Harmgart, country economist for Armenia at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. And the most laudable aspect of that growth, World Bank economist Aristomene Varoudakis says, is "that macroeconomic stability has been preserved. Inflation has remained low." It is not a secret that the WB, IMF and other international monetary organizations are admired by us. The secret is how our government was able to make the internationals believe in our statistical data. For example, IMF believes the indices of inflation and forecasts 4% inflation for the next year. It is really interesting to know if the employees of the IMF Armenian branch ever go to the store. If they go shopping they must have noticed that the price of butter in August-October has shifted up till 80%. Haven’t they later compared those with the data of the Armenian Statistics Service, according to which compared to August butter price has increased by only 14.5% (“The Index of Consumption Products of the Republic of Armenia – January-September 2007”)? This is only one example. The list may be continued not only for inflated prices. However there is no need. The thing is that the international structures praise our “tiger economy” no less than the government and support the CB of Armenia zealously when criticizing AMD revaluation and USD devaluation. Why? In one of our past publications we have mentioned that it should have been that way because the economic policy of RA government is fully reconciled with the international structures. Criticism to the RA government would mean that the international financial structures are criticizing themselves and are confessing their own failures. This assumption is confirmed by the following statement. "The Armenian government has been listening to institutions very well, which is positive," Harmgart says. "The government has always been open-minded." By the way the English word, “open-minded” has two meanings. The first one means broad horizon, expanded, etc. The second one means “obedient”. We think that in our case the most relevant meaning is “obedient”. Our country listens and obeys that there is no need to worry about the economy, which is being destroyed and the country, which has turned into a peddler. Therefore, we think it would be wiser to entitle the article of the Business Week, “Armenia a Model for Obedient Nations.”
