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On May 24, the Governor of the RA Central Bank Martin Galstyan submitted the Annual Report on Activities of the Central Bank .

According to Martin Galstyan, the report includes two documents, the Report on the Monetary Policy Program (Q1, 2022) and the Report on Implementation of the Monetary Policy Program (Q4, 2002.)

The Governor of the Central Bank said that low economic activity and a weak demand environment were forecast for 2021, mainly due to the effects of the ongoing spread of coronavirus in the world, the growing uncertainty about the economic perspectives.

“During the year, both in the partner countries and in Armenia, economic activity and aggregate demand recovered faster than expected. In some cases, the production capacity has been expanded at a relatively slow pace, which has increased additional inflationary pressures in economics,” Martin Galstyan noted.

According to the rapporteur, the influence of external demand factors in the internal services sector was more significant in the second half of the year because of higher rates of tourism than expected.

“At the same time, the expansion of the inflationary environment in the world was reflected in the increase of inflationary expectations of our society, which was facilitated by the impact of the expected changes in the prices of currently regulatory services,” the Governor of the Central Bank Martin Galstyan said. Under such inflationary developments, the Central Bank continued to pursue a policy of tightening monetary conditions during the year, increasing interest rates by a total of 2.5 percentage point, as a result of which, the inflation began to decline in the end of the year and was 7,7% in December 2021.

In his speech, the Chair of the NA Standing Committee on Financial-Credit and Budgetary Affairs Gevorg Papoyan underlined that thanks to the actions and interventions of the Central Bank, Armenia is the only country among the EAEU member states that does not have double-digit inflation.