JUNE 10 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kyrgyzstan’s GDP was 6.9% higher at the end of May than it was a year earlier, the Kyrgyz national statistics office said. The main driver of this growth was the Kumtor gold mine, Kyrgyzstan’s largest industrial project.
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(News report from Issue No. 235, published on June 11 2015)
JUNE 1 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Armenia’s economic picture this year is emerging. Its GDP increased by 2.2% in the first quarter of the year compared with 3.1% in January-March 2014. A slight drop, but not as bad as it could be.
On a trip to the city of Artashat, outside Yerevan, PM Hovik Abrahamyan said that he was pleased with the how the data was emerging.
“We have 2.3% (economic activity) growth for the first 4 months which is usually passive,” he said.
“The programs that we are implementing and the laws we are adopting can become the basis by which we will surely have more than 2.3% economic growth. We will do everything to reach 4.1% GD growth tar- get,” he said.
Like the rest of the region, the impact of falling oil prices on Russia’s economy twinned with sanctions have rippled wider and hit the South Caucasus and also Central Asia.
Mr Abrahamyan said Armenia may be able to reach GDP growth of 4.1% this year because of a number of projects in the pipeline. He highlighted increased agriculture activity of 6.6% in the first quarter of the year and a redress on the remittances’ reduction expected from Russia.
The IMF and the World Bank have said that remittances will drop by up to 40%. The Armenian Central Bank said that the figure is likely to be nearer 25% or 30%. And this is really the crux. If remittances fall sharply, GDP will too.
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(News report from Issue No. 234, published on June 4 2015)
JUNE 4 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kyrgyzstan’s government has slashed its economic growth forecast for 2015, Reuters reported.
It said that rather than the bullish prediction of growth at 6.2% in 2015, up from 3.6% in 2014 because of increased output at the Kumtor gold mine, growth would actually slow to 2%.
This reduced economic growth rate will also increase the size of its budget deficit, Reuters reported. This will rise to 5.7% of GDP from 3.3%.
Reuters said the new figures had been noted on Kyrgyz government documents.
Kyrgyzstan’s economic woes are shared by other countries across the region. It is strug- gling to deal with the fall-out from a downturn in Russia’s economy triggered by the doublehit of a sharp fall in oil prices around the world and also the impact of sanctions imposed by the West on Russia for its meddling in Ukraine.
Remittances from workers labouring in Russia are one of Kyrgyzstan’s main currency earners. The World Bank has said that this is likely to be down by 40% on 2014.
At a meeting with reporters in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan’s economy minister Oleg Pankratov explained the severity of the downturn.
“Our main partners are in deep crisis due to the rouble’s plunge … and economic sanc- tions,” she said, according to Reuters.
“Our migrants have started to transfer less cash.”
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(News report from Issue No. 234, published on June 4 2015)
JUNE 3 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) cut its growth rate estimate for GDP in 2015 in Uzbekistan to 7% from an earlier prediction of 7.8%. The falling value of the rouble and a drop in global oil prices have hit growth rates across the region.
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(News report from Issue No. 234, published on June 4 2015)
MAY 29 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Georgia’s economy by the end of April was just 0.9% larger than a year earlier, the Georgian national statistics agency said. Georgia and the rest of the region are coping with the twin impact of a drop in the value of the Russian rouble and a decline in oil prices.
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(News report from Issue No. 234, published on June 4 2015)
MAY 22 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – With oil prices around $60-$65 per barrel, Kazakhstan’s economy will grow by 3% this year, Kairat Kelimbetov, the Kazakh Central Bank chief, told Reuters. His estimate was roughly double the estimate of the IMF.
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(News report from Issue No. 233, published on May 28 2015)
MAY 20 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – The IMF and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) both delivered withering assessments of the economies of Central Asia and the South Caucasus, piling pressure on governments across the region.
Not since the global financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 has the region been under such economic strain, the IMF said in its assessment.
“Exchange rate developments, such as the appreciation of the US dollar and the depreciation of the rouble, are compounding the problem,” media quoted Juha Kähkönen, deputy director of the IMF’s Middle East and Central Asia Department, as saying at the presentation of the report in Kazakhstan on May 19.
The region’s average growth rate this year, the IMF said, would slow to 3.3% from 5.3% in 2014.
A collapse in the price of oil and the value of the rouble have knocked economies in Central Asia and the South Caucasus. Currencies have nosedived, losing around a third of their values in only a few months, governments have scrambled to cut budgets and companies have laid off hundreds of workers.
All the data, in short, paints a turbulent portrait of the last few months and an equally troublesome outlook for the next couple of years.
Mr Kähkönen’s statement came only a few days after the EBRD had issued a similar warning at its AGM in Tbilisi. It drew attention to the sharp fall in remittances to the region from Russia and the impact this would have.
“As the Russian economy has declined, remittances from Russia to Central Asia and to eastern Europe and the Caucasus have been declining at an alarming rate,” the bank said in a statement.
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(News report from Issue No. 232, published on May 20 2015)
MAY 7 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – The World Bank said it expects Kazakh GDP to grow by 1.3% this year, a drop of 0.5% on a previous estimate. It said growth rates would rise in 2016 to 2.8% and to 3.9% in 2017. A fall in global oil prices and a drop in the Russian rouble have hit C.Asia.
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(News report from Issue No. 231, published on May 13 2015)
MAY 12 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kyrgyzstan’s GDP in the first four months of 2015 was about 7% higher than for the same period in 2014, Chinara Turdu- bayeva, head of the state’s statistics committee, told media.
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(News report from Issue No. 231, published on May 13 2015)
BAKU, APRIL 8 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – – Gulnara Makhmedova, a 62-year old refugee from the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh stood in front of a crumbling Soviet apartment block tucked behind the whitewashed faculty of medicine at Baku State University.
Just a few hundred yards away luxury cars were parked up in front of haute couture shops and expensive restaurants.
Gulnara lives with five members of her family in a one-bedroom apartment. In her apartment block, electricity runs for only a few hours a day and the water that trickles out of the tap is brown.
“My family has been waiting for a new flat for over twenty years now,” she said.
Gulnara is one of around 600,000 internally displaced refugees from the conflict which pitted Azerbaijani forces against Armenian-backed separatists after the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union. Only a fragile 1994 cease-fire now keeps Nagorno-Karabakh from falling back into war.
They live in a precarious state of destitution in Azerbaijan’s sprawling capital.
“We all hoped we could start a new life here, but we only found ourselves living in worse conditions than the ones we left behind,” she said, pointing at the disintegrating mould stained ceiling of her apartment.
“When we arrived in Baku back in 1993 we immediately understood we were not welcome here as we represented a living reminder of Azerbaijan’s defeat,” she told the Bulletin referring to the thousands of civilians who fled Agdam, her hometown after an Armenian defeat of Azerbaijan.
Analysts have said that there may be another reason why Gulnara and her family are made to live in broken Soviet apartment blocks. It may suit Azerbaijani president Ilham ALiyev and his government to be able to show domestic television and visiting dignitaries the human suffering that the smouldering Nagorno-Karabakh conflict has generated.
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(News report from Issue No. 226, published on April 8 2015)
