ArmInfo. Armenia's gross international reserves decreased by 10% in Q1 2022 (against an increase of 15% in the same period a year earlier) or by $307.4 million, amounting to $2.922 billion, according to the data of the Central Bank of the Republic of Armenia.
Of these, the lion's share - $ 2.871 billion falls on external assets in hard currency, and the share of SDR in the IMF amounted to $ 51.4 million. According to the report of the regulator, for the first quarter of this year, foreign assets in hard currency decreased by 10.2% (against an increase of 15.3% a year earlier), and the share of SDRs in the IMF increased by 56.4% (against a decline of 67.2% a year earlier).
The y-o-y dynamics (March 2022 to March 2021) also had a downward trend: Gross international reserves decreased by 3% or by $86.1 million, with a decline in external assets in hard currency by 5% and a 17.4- fold significant increase in the share of SDR in the IMF. A year earlier, in March 2021 to March 2020, the dynamics had a upward trend: Gross international reserves increased by 16.5% or by $427.1 million, with the same growth in external assets in hard currency (by 16.5%) and an increase in the share of SDR in the IMF by 7.7 %.
At the same time, in March alone, Gross international reserves decreased by 3% (against 5.5% in March 2021), before that, since the beginning of the year, it had already been declining monthly. A similar monthly downward trend was observed for external assets in hard currency, which decreased by 3.7% in March (against a 5.5% decline in March 2021). And the share of SDR in the IMF, after reducing in January and February, increased significantly by 65.3% in March (against a 33.4% decline in March 2021).
In 2021, Armenia's Gross international reserves increased by 23% or by $599.4 million (against an 8.2% decline in 2020 and a pre-Covid 26.1% growth in 2019), reaching $3.230 billion. . In the structure of the Gross international reserves, external assets in hard currency increased by 22.1% to $3.197 billion, and the share of SDR in the IMF increased significantly- 3.7-fold to $32.8 million, while in 2020 external assets in hard currency were at 8.3%- th recession, and the share of SDRs in the IMF showed a relatively modest growth of 45.5%, against the pre-Covid growth of the first ones by 26.2% and the second ones by 3.2% in 2019. The share of banking gold in Armenia's gross international reserves was set to zero in December 2003.
