MAY 22 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Armenian PM Hovik Abrahamyan said the IMF and EBRD’s forecast of negative economic growth this year were wrong and that he still expected the economy to grow slightly.
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(News report from Issue No. 233, published on May 28 2015)
MAY 22 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – With oil prices around $60-$65 per barrel, Kazakhstan’s economy will grow by 3% this year, Kairat Kelimbetov, the Kazakh Central Bank chief, told Reuters. His estimate was roughly double the estimate of the IMF.
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(News report from Issue No. 233, published on May 28 2015)
MAY 25 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – The growth of the consumer loan market in Kazakhstan has stalled, media reported quoting a rankings website, another sign of the economic slowdown. Data from ranking.kz showed that year-on-year consumer credit grew by 7% to end-March, down from 45% the year before and 48% the year before that.
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(News report from Issue No. 233, published on May 28 2015)
MAY 27 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kyrgyzstan’s gold and currency reserves have dropped to $1.8b, down from 2.1b in March 2014, media reported quoting the Central Bank chief Tolkunbek Abdygulov. The drop is due to Kyrgyzstan selling gold and cash to prop up its currency. Like its neighbours, Kyrgyzstan has been struggling to deal with a steep decline in the Russian rouble and the Russian economy.
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(News report from Issue No. 233, published on May 28 2015)
MAY 22 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Sales of new apartments in Georgia have slumped because of the worsening economic conditions, media reported quoting developers. Specifically, sales of luxury apartments are down 70% and sales of more basic apartments have dropped by 10%.
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(News report from Issue No. 233, published on May 28 2015)
MAY 28 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – A senior Uzbek official hinted that Uzbekistan wanted to increase its export of refined cotton fabrics. Media quoted Dilbar Mukhamedova, a senior official in UzbekYengil- Sanoat, the state company which produces light industrial goods, as saying that Uzbekistan currently produces $1b of refined cotton products.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 233, published on May 28 2015)
MAY 25 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – In a new report, the World Bank said remittances from Tajik migrant workers to their relatives might drop by 40% this year.
Remittances in 2014 from Tajiks working in Russia made up over 42% of Tajikistan’s GDP keeping the country at the top of the world’s most remittance- dependent ranking.
The World Bank’s forecast, therefore, makes for grim reading.
According to the World Bank the Tajik economy will experience a much slower growth than in the past few years. The country’s GDP in 2015 will grow at 3.2%, less than half its 2014 figure of 6.7%.
The World Bank forecasts the growth to return above 5% only in 2017. It also said that inflation would rise steadily over the next two years to around 10%.
The data presented by the World Bank paints a dark picture for Tajikistan’s short term future.
The World Bank has given similar pessimistic forecasts for Kyrgyzstan.
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(News report from Issue No. 233, published on May 28 2015)
MAY 21 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Halyk Bank, Kazakhstan’s second largest bank majority owned by the daughter of Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev and her husband Timur Kulibayev, posted year-on-year profits down 29%. Costs had risen, in particular workers’ salaries. Kazakhstan devalued its currency in 2014, triggering wage inflation.
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(News report from Issue No. 233, published on May 28 2015)
MAY 22 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Georgia’s parliament will consider adopting a law that will shift supervisory powers over commercial banks away from the Central Bank to an independent supervisory body, media reported.
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(News report from Issue No. 233, published on May 28 2015)
MAY 22 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Uzbekistan’s Central Bank denied it was restricting access to US dollars as a form of controlling its currency.
Two days earlier, the Tashkent-based Uzmetronom.com website quoted unnamed but, supposedly, reliable sources as saying that the Central Bank had halted the process for foreign and local companies to convert their local currency into US dollars for an unspecified period of time.
This is critical for companies which are keen to get their cash out of the country. Not being allowed to convert it severely undermines their operations.
Now, though media have quoted the Uzbek Central Bank as saying that this is not true.
Like the other countries in Central Asia, Uzbekistan trying to cope with a drop in oil prices and a fall Russia’s economy which has rippled across the region.
Last week, media reported that a senior official in the Uzbek Central Bank had written a letter to his superiors to warn that the country was running out of cash and that it could hardly afford to pay for vital services and salaries.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 233, published on May 28 2015)