CBA: Armenia’s economy was not worst in the world within last 15 years

PanARMENIAN.Net - Macroeconomist of the external economic relations unit of the CBA monetary and credit policy department, Margarita Mamikonyan was surprised with the latest rating of Forbes magazine, which considered Armenia the second among world worst economies.

In an interview with Armenian media outlets, the economist acknowledged that she re-considered 20 ratings of other leading international structures, and came to understand that these ratings are not used with the aim of political manipulations.

According to her, within last 15 years starting from 1996 Armenia’s economy was not among the worst in the world. “The poorest index in corruption was recorded by Transparency International among 178 countries, Armenia ranked 123-126th positions,” said Mamikonyan.

The specialist explained that the rating is a link between investor and a country attracting investments. On one hand, the rating allows business entities to attract long-term credits and become recognizable at international markets, on the other hand, helps raise investor’s trust and understand risks in that country.

According to Fitch rating, Armenia (BB-) leaves behind Georgia (B+) and Ukraine (В+), while amid Eastern Europe countries our country does not yield to Serbia. Besides, based on current developments Armenia is more successive than Greece, whereas among CIS states Armenia is the most successful compared with three oil extracting states, namely, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Russia. Moreover according to Moody’s rating Armenia is ahead of Moldova, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia among CIS countries, and ahead of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania and Montenegro among Eastern and Central Europe countries.

According to Mamikonyan, ratings of Moody’s and Fitch are important for investors, after which they study ratings of companies assessing investment field of a country, which are Heritage Foundation, Freedom House, the report of World Bank Doing Business and other structures.