Yerevan/Mediamax/. Toughening of monetary-credit policy will mainly lead to deterring of consumer crediting and increase in AMD deposits. No significant changes in business crediting are expected this year.

Mediamax reports that Head of Monetary-Credit Policy Department of the Central Bank (CB) of Armenia Artur Stepanyan voiced such an opinion at a news conference today. He reasoned his opinion by the fact that as opposed to consumer credits, business credits are mainly issued in foreign currency, “and we do not expect increase of interest rates here”.

Touching upon crediting of agriculture, which is mainly realized in AMD, Artur Stepanyan stated that CB will discuss with banks the mechanisms, which will allow not limiting crediting of the sector. “Agriculture increases the offer of foodstuffs, which is a most important factor for deterring inflation, and consequently, as a result of negotiations with banks, we should elaborate agricultural crediting mechanisms on exclusive conditions”, Artur Stepanyan stated.

According to him, the developments in the global market are concordant with CB forecasts, which expects slow down in the speeds of the inflation in the second quarter of 2011 and its abrupt reduction in the second half of the year. Artur Stepanyan noted that the actions of the government and CB create the necessary preconditions for returning the inflation to the frames of the target corridor (4% plus/minus 1.5 percentage points).

According to Artur Stepanyan, the further toughening of monetary-credit policy will depend on inflationary developments both in the domestic and the external markets. At that, Artur Stepanyan stressed that all non-traditional measures of struggle against high inflation mainly concern the government and other state structures. “In order to deter inflation, CB has only two main tools – the refinancing rate and the norm of mandatory backup. Not a single Central Bank in the world has other instruments to deter inflation”, Artur Stepanyan stated.

Commenting on the statement of the government opponents, according to which inflation in Armenia is mainly conditioned by internal factors, in particular, by monopolies and the oligarchic structure of the economy, Artur Stepanyan stated that the structure of Armenian economy has not undergone significant changes over the past years, and inflation was at a low level.

“It turns out that even in conditions of monopoly, oligopoly and problems with corruption we had low inflation. Its increase took place only under the pressure of the external environment and the year of no harvest”, Head of Monetary-Credit Policy Department of CB stated.

At the session of March 4, the Central Bank of Armenia made a decision to increase the refinancing rate by 0.5 percentage points up to 8.25%. In February,  2011, 1.9% inflation was registered, as a result of which its 12 months’ index made 12.4%, 10.1 percentage points of which due to increase of prices for foodstuffs.