Pashinyan government achieves ‘unprecedented’ extra budget revenues, announces wage raises in military, education sectors

The 2019 state budget’s revenues will be over-performed by at least 40 billion drams, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan told lawmakers today in parliament.

“This is approximately 90 million dollars. This means state revenues in 2019 will be this much more than it was envisaged by the budget passed by parliament. This is an unprecedented occurrence for at least the past 9 years because for at least a quite long period of time we didn’t have a situation when the budget’s revenues were over-performed, left alone in such huge volumes,” he said.

He also elaborated what the government plans to do with the extra money.

“We intend to raise the salaries of military servicemen by 10% starting July 1 2019, and from September 1 the salaries of public school teachers will be raised by the same amount. I am talking about approximately 38,000 teachers. In addition, this year we plan to carry out various level of renovation of nearly 303 kilometers of roads, which is also an unprecedented indicator for the last 9 years, but we also hope and know that savings will happen during this process”, he said, noting that the North-South Road Corridor construction isn’t included in this figures.

He said the government will allocate another 10 billion drams for implementing subvention programs.

Speaking about the additional 40 billion drams in collected revenue, the PM said: “This is first and foremost a result of the government’s and the state revenue committee’s policy against the black market. And since I predict that concerns will be raised as to what extent can this negatively impact our economy, I would like to note that repressive methods weren’t at all used during this process, analytical, negotiations and dialogue methods are applied”. He also mentioned “cooperation between citizens and the government” as the next important factor.

“I am happy to note that Armenian citizens are truly broadly reacting to the government’s calls that they themselves also have things to do in combating shadow economy. Do you remember my calls that people must demand [payment bills] whenever they buy anything from anywhere, and I am happy to note that from May 2018 until now 65 million more payment bills have been printed than in the previous period. This is yet another proof that the society and the government are in a practical dialogue with one another and this dialogue is giving concrete results”, he said.