I Believe It Will Happen: Finance Minister

I believe it will happen: This was stated by Finance Minister Vahe Hovhannisyan during a press briefing while responding to questions about the opening of the border with Turkey and the signing of a peace agreement with Azerbaijan.

According to the Finance Minister, studies have been conducted on the potential economic impact of these two possible events on the Armenian economy, but these scenarios have not been included in the medium-term expenditure program for 2026.

“Such scenarios can have a very high deviation. Personally, I believe it will happen and will happen not too late, but the level of its impact will depend on its speed and phase. In this regard, the estimations would be very approximate, and it would not be correct to base them on that document,” said Vahe Hovhannisyan.

The Finance Minister refrained from disclosing numerical figures from the conducted studies but noted that the government has examined potential scenarios regarding changes in commodity flows and has made general conclusions about how these flows may change and what impact it may have.

“Everything depends on what changes will occur after the border opening and how much traffic will pass through Armenia. And this question of traffic is not just an economic one; there are also political issues. It depends, for example, on how the investment situation between Armenia and Turkey will change after the opening of the Armenian-Turkish border: will the goods to be exported to Turkey and Azerbaijan be produced in Armenia, or vice versa? There are questions here that are difficult to measure at this moment. There can be general reasoning and a matter of taste,” the minister noted. He added that he would not want to base important documents on those “general reasoning and taste.”