Development of institutions and infrastructures, improvement of the financial system, stimulating innovations, macro-economic stability… definitely people are afraid of these words because the state official don’t miss a single opportunity to speak of them.
Of course these are important discussions, and the most important thing is the serious look impression given by long-lasting and modern words.
However it doesn’t matter what they say, the situation does not get better and everything goes in the other direction.
In order to justify the above written, let’s refer to the World Economic Forum. The WEF publishes a report on competitiveness every year. We didn’t find any happy facts in the report published by the WEF several days ago. According to the report, Armenia occupies the 98th place in the list of competitiveness of 139 countries.
From the prospective of institutional development, we lost two places, the infrastructures – 9, innovation – 8, technological development – 3 and macroeconomic stability – 46 places. Of course there are other sectors where we had positive development. For example, in the sectors named ”development of product market” and ”improvement of business” we went up by three places. However, with these ratings we are in the 113rd and 109th places correspondingly among the 139 countries.
There are other standards, which show whether the bright speeches have really brought to any positive results. Do you remember the lessons learnt from the crisis the PM has been speaking about? One of these lessons was the struggle against oligopolies, i.e. the establishment of a free and equal competition environment. The report on competitiveness also classifies countries according to their ”shortcomings”. The situation concerning the ”noteworthy shortcomings” on part of Armenia is the following: we are in the 138th place among 139 countries with the anti-monopoly policy, with the domestic intensive competition – the 136th, and existence of dominating powers in the market – in the 133rd place.
We should not b disappointed as we have competition privileges as well. Even we are in the first place with this privilege. It is called “influence of malaria on business”. It means that due to the perfect anti-crisis policy of our government the entrance of malaria mosquitoes has into the Armenian business sector has been prevented, thus businesses can do their work without being afraid of malaria mosquitoes.
However, according to the report corruption is a big obstacle for our businessmen. 16.9% of the questioned people said that corruption is a big problem for their activities. The next problem is tax administration (16.5%), unavailability of financial resources (11.4%), bureaucracy (10.8%), infrastructure malformation, currency exchange rate changes, taxes, etc. As we can see, nobody complains of malaria. Simply the government does not speak of malaria but speaks of fighting corruption every day.
In other words, the World Economic Forum report that our country is not compatible. Our competitiveness index is lower than not only that of our neighbors Georgia and Azerbaijan but certain African countries as well. Namibia, Botswana, Rwanda, Gambia and even Honduras are more compatible than Armenia.
Those people who say that we have a history of many ages and are older than many other nations will feel sad for this fact. Even more, now we are a country that the notion of the “Armenian world”, project, strategy, active propaganda, etc. However, it turns out that the Armenian World is becoming less compatible. Has anybody heard an expression like Barbadian world? How many people can show on the map where this country is? Tell you frankly the people of Barbados don’t care about it as they don’t have a history of many ages, but still they are among the countries which are transforming from the developing line to the line of the developed countries, two steps above us.