Authorities inflate Armenia's economic bubble - pundit

Armenian political observer Hakob Badalyan has made a post on his Facebook account saying that according to the November 2023 index, bank lending to the economy in Armenia recorded double-digit growth in all areas: consumer, mortgage, construction, trade and services, except industry compared to November 2022".

"However, bank loans to the industrial sector not only did not show double-digit growth, but there was no growth at all. There was a 3 per cent decline in lending. Industry is the backbone of any healthy economy. And if the economy shows double-digit growth, but the industrial sector and export industries are shrinking, it means one thing: the economy is not growing, but swelling,” he noted, Caliber.Az reports.

“What is required here is the political will of economic policymakers to abandon the "magic conjunctural effect" of double-digit growth and take reform steps to push this growth into the industrial export sector.

However, today there is not only no desire to abandon political populism, but on the contrary, there is a tendency of 'double-digit growth' populism, which means that the bubble of Armenia's economy will continue to inflate," the pundit posted.