By Smbat Grigoryan
Inflation amounted to 0.9 percent in Armenia in July on an annualized basis. After the recent stagnation, the state of retail trade has normalized. Between January and June, the physical volume of retail trade significantly grew (by 6.2 percent). As it might be supposed, positive trend was observed in the domestic monetary transfers (significant part of which comes from Russia) received by natural persons in Armenia.
The growth of the effective demand apparently resulted in the price hike of a number of goods. In July, the food products got 3.3 percent more expensive on an annualized basis. The growth of prices in the group “alcohol beverages and tobacco products” (by 3.8 percent) can be connected with the growth of the excise tax rate for tobacco products and not with the growth of consumer demand.
However, the amount of monetary transfers did not overall grow too significantly. Thus, small addition to the scanty family budget was enough for recipients of transfers only for slight improvement of their food conditions. Under these circumstances, the prices of non-grocery goods, as well as the tariffs for certain types of services not only did not grow but even dropped somewhat.
For instance, the communication services have become cheaper by merely symbolic 0.1 percent, whereas serious drop in proceeds—nearly by quarter (by 24.7 percent)–can be observed in the sphere of mobile connection between January and June. The situation is almost the same in the sphere of wire telephony—18 percent drop in proceeds. At the same time the physical volume according to the access to the Internet grew by 34.8 percent (!), that is for more than one third.
It is widely known that apart from a wide specter of services, the world web provides the users a unique opportunity to communicate via Skype call or other social networks. It is apparent that the free video communication is much more attractive than the paid voice call.
Such opportunities are also provided by modern mobile phones (for instance, by free app Viber). But many people find it more profitable to use stationary computers, as well as tablets and notebooks for that purpose. Thus, mass switching from paid phone services (including intercity and international) to free ones on the Internet is not ruled out.
