ArmInfo. The unemployment rate in Armenia in 2023 will be below 10%. Armenian Minister of Economy Vahan Kerobyan stated a similar opinion in an interview with Glumoff on Radio Van.
In particular, he recalled about 100,000 vacancies in the country. In this vein, the minister drew attention to the many companies that are engaged in outstaffing in Armenia today. "These are companies that, so to speak, quickly recruit people to fill those vacancies," he said.
In the same context, Kerobyan expressed hope that foreign citizens who moved to Armenia will stay here and there will be more of them.
He stressed that many immigrants chose Armenia as their place of residence, rather than, for example, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, since the right environment was provided for them in our country. <And it primarily refers to freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of business, low level of crime. And in fact, this is not a matter of one day, one year, but a matter of the last 5 years>, he stressed. The minister noted that since the beginning of the year, a working group has been formed, which, working aggressively, provided immigrants with all the necessary assistance, starting from filling out paperwork, ending with the registration of an individual entrepreneur, etc.
In connection with the arrival of a large number of talented people with their jobs in the RA, Kerobyan noted that the most part of the investments in Armenia are now made virtually. He stressed that the Ministry, under his leadership, is working to ensure that the country's economy develops precisely through investment, rather than through consumption, as it has been for the past 30 years.
<It is very important to understand that the economy over the past 30 years has been driven by consumption. People took out loans, bought TVs, cars, apartments, and so on. That is, growth was based on the public debt and the debt of the people. There was some investment, but the main fuel for the economy was consumption. And now we are trying to change all this by ensuring economic growth through investment>, he explained. It should be reminded that in one of the last interviews, referring to the data of the Border Service, Minister of Economy Vahan Kerobyan said that 110,000 foreign citizens live in Armenia, 60,000 of which are of Armenian origin. The vast majority of immigrants who moved to Armenia are mainly citizens of Russia, but there are also citizens from Ukraine and Belarus. It should be noted that in the first half of 2022, total foreign investments in the amount of 1.6 billion dollars entered the real sector of Armenia's economy (all types and forms of investments - ed. note), the y-o-y growth rate slowed down from 35% up to 23%.At the same time, the volume of foreign direct investment (FDI), on the contrary, accelerated in growth from 50% to 68%, reaching $623 million or 40% of the total volume of foreign investment. This is evidenced by the data of the RA Statistical Committee on the gross flow of investments, on the basis of which ArmInfo specialists calculated the volumes of total investments and FDI in the reporting period (I half of the year) and a comparable interval a year ago. The Central Bank in its new forecast for 2022, further improved expectations for the unemployment rate in Armenia downward to 13.6% (from 15.3% in 2021), against the previously forecasted decline to 14.1%. But in the medium term, in parallel with some slowdown in economic growth, the unemployment rate is expected to rise to 15%, which repeats the previously indicated forecast level. According to the RA Statistical Committee, the average y-o-y unemployment rate in Armenia decreased in 2021 to 15.3% from 18.1% in 2020.
