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At April 27 sitting of the NA Standing Committee on Financial-Credit and Budget Affairs, the RA Acting Minister of Finance Atom Janjughazyan presented for debate the reference on the execution process of the state budget of nine months in 2020.

The Acting Minister informed that the Government should present the annual report on budget execution to the parliament in accordance with law until May 1. Janjughazyan spoke about the feature of 2020, referred to the negative consequences of the pandemic on the economy. “In case of the previous crises, on the one hand it was a shock of a supply, on the other hand – demand. There was a shock of a supply and a demand for 2020,” the Minister underlined.

According to him, if there were optimistic forecasts until 2020, then in the beginning of the year reputable international financial organizations already changed their forecasts. If the forecasts published in January still continued the inertia of optimism for 2019, according to the information published by the International Monetary Fund, economic growth was estimated at 3.3%, then in April the forecast for the world economy was negative 3%. A 4.9% decline was forecast in June.

Atom Janjughazyan referred to the consequences of the war unleashed by Azerbaijan.

It was noted that taking into account the degree of uncertainty typical of that period, the draft law was presented to revise the budget framework in accordance with the 2% economic decline scenario. The aim of the logic of a change of the iscal policy was to have an equivalent policy to it. “During an economic downturn, it is assumed that it should be a policy having a neutral or a contractionary impact, and the resources accumulated during that period should be used during the expected crisis to mitigate the negative impact of the crisis,” the Acting Minister stated. He added that no obligations related to the commitments were reduced, on the contrary, new commitments were proposed.

The index provided for the incomes with the nine-month programme was done by 98.8%. It is remarkable that the expected index from the internal resources was done by 100.3%. The tax revenues compared to the programme had a performance of 100.6%. A performance of 84.4% was recorded in terms of expenditures. The performance of the targeted programmes implemented by the external support was relatively low with nine-month results which was 27,5%.