YEREVAN, January 14. \/ ARKA \/. Ex-prime minister Hrant Bagratian dismissed today Armenian authorities\u2019 claims that the \u2018unprecedented\u2019 inflation last year was due to external factors, primarily because of higher food prices resulting from a sharp fall in domestic agriculture production and the increased cost of wheat and other cereals on international markets.<\/p>\n
Armenia ended 2010 with a nearly double-digit inflation of 9.4 percent. According to Armenian Central Bank, 6-7 percentage points of the total inflation rate were due to circumstances beyond the Central Bank\u2019s control, like a decline in agricultural produce and a rise in world food prices<\/p>\n
Speaking at a press conference today, Hrant Bagratian, who served as prime minister in the administration of Armenia\u2019s first post-Soviet president Levon Ter-Petrosian, in the 1990s, blamed the high inflation on domestic factors, saying Armenia\u2019s inflation had nothing to do with global rise of food prices. In his words, the main reason behind high inflation is monopolization of retail trade by oligarchic structures.<\/p>\n
\u2018Retail trade has bee monopolized like other lucrative economy sectors, by oligarchs. The bulk of retail trade in Yerevan last year was conducted through four supermarkets, which dictated food prices as smaller stores were gradually ousted.,\u2019 he claimed.<\/p>\n
On Thursday Gagik Minasian, chairman of a parliament committee on financial and budgetary issues, blamed last year\u2019s high inflation on a dramatic 14.5 decline in agriculture, unfavorable climatic conditions that damaged a sizeable portion of crops and high prices of wheat at global markets. The government inflation projection for 2011 is 4% (\u00b11.%). -0-<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ex-prime minister Hrant Bagratian dismissed today Armenian authorities\u2019 claims that the \u2018unprecedented\u2019 inflation last year was due to external factors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","tstyn_error":""},"categories":[12139,9216],"tags":[15837,12225,334],"class_list":{"0":"post-18723","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-economy-en","7":"category-news","8":"tag-armenia-2","9":"tag-inflation","10":"tag-334"},"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/armbanks.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18723","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/armbanks.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/armbanks.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/armbanks.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/armbanks.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18723"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/armbanks.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18723\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/armbanks.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/armbanks.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/armbanks.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}