It was down from 13 percent reported by the Armenian government in 2022 and 18.2 percent in 2020.
“I don’t remember Armenia ever having such a low unemployment rate,” Finance Minister Vahe Hovannisian said recently.
The South Caucasus country of less than 3 million has for decades suffered from high unemployment that has caused hundreds of thousands of its citizens to emigrate to Russia, the United States and other nations. The Armenian economy has grown at relatively robust rates during most of the past decade, translating into new jobs and higher incomes.
Some economists believe that the real unemployment rate is higher than what is shown by government data. But they do not deny that it has fallen in the past decade.
Government officials admit, for their part, that a considerable percentage of the country’s workforce remains jobless for various reasons.
“We have a large army of young people who do not work or study and are not integrated into the labor market,” Ruben Sargsian, a deputy minister of labor and social affairs, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service in late December.
“We have a large population, including women in the age range of 30-40, who do not integrate into the labor market or have difficulties with integration. We have a large number of beneficiaries who receive benefits while being able to work but not working for whatever reason,” Sargsian said, adding that the government needs to do a better job of helping such people find work.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that job vacancies in Armenia and especially Yerevan are at a record high these days. However, most of these are menial jobs which Armenians are now less willing to do than they were in the past and which increasingly attract migrants from low-income foreign countries, notably India. According to various estimates, between 15,000 and 30,000 Indians have moved to Armenia in the last few years.