ArmInfo.Armenia's gross international reserves in January-April 2022 decreased by 5% or $ 161.5 million to $ 3.068 billion, according to the Central Bank of Armenia.Of these, the lion's share - $3.017 billion falls on external assets in hard currency, and the share of SDRs in the IMF amounted to $49.8 million. According to the report of the regulator, for January-April of this year, foreign assets in hard currency decreased by 5.6%, while the share of SDRs in the IMF increased by 51.5%.
At the same time, the y-o-y dynamics (April 2022 to April 2021) turned out to be upward: gross international reserves increased by 2.6% or by $77.8 million, with an increase in external assets in hard currency by 2.2% and the share of SDR in the IMF by 27.8%.
And in April alone, the gross international reserves increased their dynamics by 5%, from the 3% decline in March, while a year earlier, and in March and April, a downward trend was recorded. A similar monthly volatility was observed in foreign assets in hard currency - with a 5.1% growth out of the 3.7% decline. At the same time, the share of SDR in the IMF, after a slight monthly decline in January-February, and then after a 65.3% jump in March, fell again by 3.1% in April. As a comparison, we note that in January-April 2021, the dynamics of gross international reserves was upward: foreign assets in hard currency increased by 13.2%, the share of SDR in the IMF jumped 4.3-fold, which ultimately increased the level of gross international reserves by 14.3%.
On a y-o- terms, (April 2021 to April 2020), an upward trend was also observed: gross international reserves - by 20.1% due to an increase in external assets in hard currency by 18.6%, with a 14.3-fold jump in the share of SDR in the IMF. And in April 2021 alone, the gross international reserves slowed down their decline from 5.5% to 0.6%, in particular, the rate of decline in external assets in hard currency slowed down from 5.5 to 1.8%, and the dynamics of the SDR share in the IMF reversed from 33.4 % decline to a significant increase of 13.2-fold.
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 jumped 3.7-fold to $32.8 million, while external assets in hard currency were in a 8.3% recession in 2020, and the share of SDR in the IMF showed a relatively modest growth of 45.5%, against the pre-Covid growth in 2019 of the first one by 26.2% and the second one by 3.2%. The share of banking gold in Armenia's gross international reserves was set to zero in December 2003.
