Poverty in Armenia continued to fall slowly last year despite sluggish economic growth, the National Statistical Service (NSS) said on Tuesday.
In an annual report, the government agency said 29.4 percent of Armenians lived below the official poverty line as of the end of 2016, down from 29.8 percent in 2015.
The poverty line is set at almost 40,900 drams ($85) per month. The NSS regards as “very poor” over a third of some 880,000 Armenians whose average monthly income did not exceed that figure. Another 54,000 people are considered “extremely poor,” NSS officials said as they presented the report to journalists in Yerevan.
Adrine Babloyan of the Yerevan office of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) also spoke at the news conference. Babloyan expressed concern over the fact that at 34.2 percent the poverty rate among Armenian children was still above the nationwide average. And it did not shrink considerably in 2016, she said.
Poverty fell more rapidly during an almost a decade of double-digit economic growth in Armenia that came to an end with the onset of a global financial crisis in late 2008. It stood at 27.6 percent at that time but soared to almost 36 percent in 2010, one year after the country’s Gross Domestic Product shrunk by over 14 percent.
Economic growth has been modest since then. It all but ground to a halt in 2016 but seems to have significantly accelerated this year. NSS data released in recent months suggests that the Armenian economy is now on course to expand by at least 4 percent.
Senior government officials have said that rapid poverty reduction is contingent on an economic growth rate of at least 5 percent. Prime Minister Karen Karapetian’s cabinet set this annual growth target in its five-year policy program approved by parliament in June.
The 120-page program says that sustained faster growth will cut poverty to about 18 percent by 2022.
Using a different methodology, the World Bank has recorded lower poverty rates in Armenia. According to it, just under 25 percent of Armenians lived in poverty in 2016. In a report released in May, the bank forecast that the poverty rate will fall to 22.2 percent in 2019.
The NSS currently estimates the average monthly wage in the country at just over 190,000 drams ($394).The official rate of unemployment exceeds 20 percent.