Armenia has made noteworthy and sustained progress towards becoming a fully functioning market economy in the 17 years since its 1991 independence. In the late 1990s, after a severe economic crisis related to the transition to independence and the conflict with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenian government began to adopt effective measures to achieve macroeconomic stability and promote private sector development. This growth, combined with poverty focused social protection policies, has led to a rapid decline in poverty and improvements in living standards.
Building capacity for evidence-based policy-making has been one of the Government’s priorities. In this, particular attention has been paid to a household budget survey and capacity to monitor poverty. The objective of the Programmatic Poverty Assessment (PPA) is to provide technical assistance for improvements in the capacity to collect accurate and reliable data on households, build local capacity, and provide high quality analysis of poverty and policies to inform policy-making.
The PPA is in an advanced implementation stage. The National Statistical Service played a crucial role in dissemination and presentation of the results to various stakeholders in the Government and donor community. Moreover, the surveys facilitated the dialogue on poverty at national levels, improved the resource allocation mechanisms at different administrative levels, and finally played a significant role in the preparation of the new Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP).
RSS