YEREVAN, July 18. / ARKA /. An official of the Armenian Central Bank said today an extremely negative rating given earlier this month to Armenia’s economy was surprising. Speaking at a news conference, Margarita Mamikonian, a Central Bank expert in macroeconomics,
said she has been monitoring and analysing assessments of the Armenian economy given by various international organizations for the last 15 years and was just surprised by the latest assessment of the Forbes that ranked Armenia as the second worst economy in the world.
On July 5 Forbes released its ranking saying it based its conclusions on the analysis of the macro-economic indicators of 177 countries and regions over the past three years. Other data used by Forbes included the per capita gross domestic product growths as released by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the current account balances and the IMF-forecast inflation rates in the coming 2012. However, it cited no figures to support its conclusion. According to the magazine, the list of top five worst economies was led by Madagascar, followed by Armenia, Guinea, Ukraine and Jamaica.
Mamikonian said today she had looked through the rankings of top 20 organizations that assign ratings to different countries of the world, and they all suggest that Armenia has never been among the worst countries being somewhere in the middle. Mamikonian said Armenia’s corruption perception index (CPI) in Transparency International’s 2010 report dropped by 0.1 from 2.7 to 2.6. By its score Armenia shared the rankings of 123 to 126 together with Eritrea, Madagascar and Niger. “This is the worst index of our country,’ she said.
According to her, assessments reflecting the general nature of an economy can be found in the global competitiveness index, published by the World Economic Forum. In its latest ranking Armenia was on the 90th position among 140 countries. According to her, this ranking’s methodology separately considers 100 indicators and in many ways Armenia ranks above average.
She also stressed that the ratings assigned by Moody’s and Fitch are very important for investors and only then they look at assessments of the Heritage Foundation, Freedom House, the World Bank’s Doing Business, EBRD assessment of structural change and son on. In particular, Mamikonian added that according to Moody’s rating, Armenia is above Moldova, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania and Montenegro.
By Fitch rating Armenia (BB-) is currently ahead of Georgia (B+) and Ukraine (B), and is on a par with Serbia. By Fitch rating only three countries are ahead of Armenia, they are oil-exporting Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Russia.
Earlier the Armenian ministry of finance said it had reviewed the four indicators that were used by Forbes Magazine and found that none was calculated correctly. -0-
