Yerevan, May 24. /Mediamax/. At the meeting with foreign ambassadors to Armenia on May 24, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan summed up the results, issues and challenges of his first year in office.

We present the most important excerpts from PM’s speech.

Economic stability 

The first problem we had in terms of economics was to maintain macroeconomic stability. Not without some difficulty, we were able to solve this problem because in September last year, just three months after the revolution, we approached the threshold of recession and the economic situation could be strained. But we managed to overcome these negative trends, and we had a 7.1% GDP growth in the first quarter of this year. Although this growth is pleasing to us, we understand that the statistics is a little bit lower for the proposed economic revolution. At least we should try to increase the rate of growth by 2-3%.

New jobs

Armenia created 51,000 new openings over the last year. Those are the jobs that employees themselves declared to tax authorities.

 

According to our estimation, 1/5 of these 51,000 jobs were generated during the past year. This makes some 10,000 new jobs, which I think is not a bad indicator.

USD 130m 

We have already announced that the state budget will improve its result by at least AMD 62bn this year. This makes about USD 130m. There is no doubt, that the indicator will improve until the year-end.   

Investments and independent judiciary 

Foreign investment is the biggest challenge we are facing today in the economy. We do our best to make our country more attractive for foreign investment. But there is also conviction and understanding that without a truly independent judiciary we will not be able to address this problem because any investor wants to safeguard his or her investment, and such guarantees can only be provided by a truly independent judicial system.

 

Foreign policy 

Our relations continue to be of strategic nature with the Russian Federation, we are a member and the presiding country in the Eurasian Economic Union. We succeeded in finding specific solutions within the Collective Security Treaty Organization, and I believe that our relations in the CSTO and the Russian Federation are developing normally.

We managed to develop our relations with the European Union as well. We are at the final stage of the roadmap to the Comprehensive and Enhanced Partnership Agreement, which will be finalized in the coming weeks and we will be working in that direction.

We managed to maintain and develop a good atmosphere with our immediate neighbors - Iran, Georgia. We have established a very good working atmosphere with China.

 

We are also building normal relationship with the United States. The strategic dialogue with the United States has kicked off recently, and we hope and are convinced that we will have good results there.

Once again judicial system

I am convinced that the political changes will be absolutely pointless if we do not build a truly independent judicial system.

The executive and legislative powers already enjoy the population’s trust, and the time has come for the judicial system to gain the same trust.