YEREVAN. - Armenia is not going to accumulate foreign debt, Atom Janjughazyan, Armenia’s Deputy Finance Minister and Chief Treasurer said in the parliament on Friday, introducing the bill on changes to the Law on State Debt.  

The bill proposes to include only the foreign debt of the government in the required limits of state debt. Currently, the upper permissible limit (60 per cent of GDP) of that debt includes the debts of both the government and Armenia’s Central Bank (CB).  

However, it’s not that the policy of the Central Bank is out of control, he said. The upper limit of the debt of Central Bank has not been fixed even before. “Of course, there is an indirect dependency. It’s clear that if the Central Bank has large foreign debt, we’ll have to compensate it by the state budget surplus. But the policy of the government and the Central Bank cannot directly depend on each other,” Janjughazayan said.   

The proposed change to the law supposes that Armenia’s government can accumulate more debt. However, according to the Deputy Minister, nobody will actually do this.

“If the international partners have the least doubt in our creditworthiness, they will immediately stop. That’s why one shouldn’t think that we are making a new snowball of credits and pulling the plug on the future of our country,” he said.  

The only objective of the bill is to improve the financial statistics of the country in line with the international practice.