The RA Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and the RA President Armen Sargsyan also touched upon the economic difficulties related to the epidemic during today's meeting.
Armen Sargsyan noted that the situation in the world is the same, but it certainly does not lighten the burden placed on the shoulders of our country and government.
"On the contrary, everyone's badness indirectly affects Armenia's economy, it will have a strong impact on certain areas, in particular, hotel services, tourism, jobs, social issues. So, it is really a difficult moment, there are big problems", he said.
The Prime Minister, in his turn, stressed that the coronavirus is a big problem for our country. The PM stressed: "Yes, coronavirus is a big problem for our country. Looking back on what happened, we noticed at the end of April that despite the severe restrictions, we are able to keep those restrictions in place in the seen places, but the anti-epidemic processes take place behind the scenes, in the yards and at the entrances.
We recorded two things - that the restrictions did not bring us the desired result and the second - in April we lost 70,000 jobs”.
According to Pashinyan, the government formulated the main issue as follows: Health capacity must be developed so that no citizen is left without proper medical care. "I can state that we solved that problem, very serious capacities were developed, we made big expenses from the state budget in order to acquire equipment, to expand", said he, adding:
"I can state that we solved that problem, very serious capacities were deployed, we made big expenses from the state budget to acquire equipment, deploy, etc. As a result, we had the following: 50,000 jobs were restored in June, and in July we had a slightly higher number of jobs than in the same period last year. It was obvious to me that if we were guided only by health logic, we would face a social collapse", said the Prime Minister.
According to Pashinyan, today we have a chance to finally have the best situation globally in the fall, because now we see that there are countries in the world that have officially declared that they have overcome the coronavirus, but have to return to the logic of the strictest restrictions.
"Yes, you are right, we, in fact, have problems in the economy and now we are trying to find sectoral solutions. And the main task is to keep and increase jobs. Of course, this is the initial goal, but it means boosting exports, boosting production, boosting consumption.
By the way, are you aware, of course, that we have implemented more than 20 anti-crisis programs, within the framework of which we have already invested more than 100 billion drams in various social and economic directions through the banking system and the state budget.
We are now continuing this process by sectors, trying to make sure that the first task is to keep jobs, and that the sectors maintain their competitiveness in order to recover quickly after overcoming the economic crisis", he said.
