The government is projecting 7 percent economic growth for 2022, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said today, October 25, during the discussion of the “Budget 2022” draft in the National Assembly, noting that the government hopes for more. For 2021, the government had forecast 6 percent economic growth.
Noting that in September 2021 Armenia registered an absolute record in the number of paid jobs — 651,141 paid jobs — the Prime Minister stressed that Armenia has never had such a high figure. This year’s figure is 3 percent higher than last year’s.
Against the backdrop of quite high inflation of 6.4 percent during the current year, the Prime Minister emphasized that the total wage fund has grown by 15.3 percent, or 19 billion 308 million drams, compared to last September, and the average wage per worker has grown by 11.9 percent, or 23,782 drams, compared to last September.
Exports have grown by more than 20 percent, construction volumes by 7 percent, and the growth in services as of September stood at more than 5 percent, said the head of the executive, stressing that these factors make the 7 percent economic growth target realistic, “especially since several large investment programs have already been launched and, I hope, will be successfully completed, whose primary target is to turn Armenia from a country exporting raw mineral resources into a country with the longest possible chain of strong metallurgy and metal processing.”
“According to the draft, 2022 budget revenues amount to 1 trillion 946 billion drams, which is 17 percent more than in 2021 and 25 percent more than in 2020. Expenditures amount to 2 trillion 190 billion drams, which is 10 percent more than in 2021 and 16 percent more than in 2020. The 2022 capital expenditures amount to 347 billion drams, which is 55 percent more than in 2021 and 53 percent more than in 2020,” the Prime Minister informed.
Minister of Economy Vahan Kerobyan had earlier also spoken of the possibility of double-digit economic growth, thanks in part to the 2.6 billion euro support package to be allocated to Armenia by the European Union over the next five years.
