By Vahe Makaryan
The Minister of Economy Vahan Kerobyan does not know what economic growth is or does not have a good idea of its essence, and instead of reading a little to enrich his economic knowledge, he gives such advice to journalists. Of course, we also need it. Especially when communicating with such ministers, so as not to allow ourselves to be misled by the public through word games and “terminological” manipulations.
Today, Kerobyan has already managed to shine with his next amazing thought that “citizens live better even in the face of such high inflation than, for example, a year ago or two years ago, because this year we have real economic growth.”
We tried to tell the minister that in the conditions of inflation we have nominal growth, not real economic growth, as he says, but the minister began to urge us to gain a little more knowledge. Of course, the minister’s advice is appropriate, but first he must follow that advice in order to have a clearer idea of the essence of economic growth.
Vahan Kerobyan mixes economic growth and GDP growth. It is the growth of that GDP that is real and nominal. Economic growth is not real or nominal. The so-called economic growth is the real growth of the GDP. But today Vahan Kerobyan is not enough, he tries to convince the public with wrong terminology that there is economic growth, and one more thing, he tries to “hold” the nominal growth conditioned by inflation instead of the real GDP growth.
We tried to explain to him that economic growth is the real growth of GDP, now they are trying to present at the expense of inflation that they have high indicators of economic growth. If we explain with a simple example, the trade turnover has not increased or has increased a little or something, but the prices of goods have increased, as a result the budget revenues have increased, but the economy has not developed from that. “Real economic growth is the nominal growth adjusted by inflation. In other words, we have nominal growth, we remove the impact of inflation from it, we get real economic growth, “Minister Kerobyan used the wrong terminology again.