This year the reserve volume of foreign exchange purchase from the Central Bank of Armenia (CBA) reached $487.7 million. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan announced this at Thursday’s Cabinet meeting of the government.

"This is a very important indicator because we were expecting this trend to decline at the end of the tourism season, but we are getting signs that our tourism season may be 12 months a year," he added.

Also, Pashinyan asked CBA governor Artur Javadyan whether there was a problem that so many foreign currencies appeared in our country.

"This really has no precedent as compared to all countries and all periods,” Javadyan responded. “Even in 2014-2016, when we had a sharp strengthening of the national currency, we did not buy this amount of foreign currency. This means that we do not have a foreign currency outflow that our opponents are talking about, but an inflow. We sterilize that flow, we buy that foreign currency, and that amount of money goes into the economy. We have a dual effect here: on the one hand, we are fighting against dollarization, on the other hand, we are injecting money into the economy. In this sense, I am confident that this year we will have an unprecedented volume of reserves by the end of the year.”

He also stressed that in September, those reserves were about $200 million more, and we will have better data in October.