Baku, Azerbaijan, Oct. 9
By Maksim Tsurkov - Trend:
Italy intends to provide support to Azerbaijan to diversify its economy, President of the Italian Trade Agency (ITA) Riccardo Monti said Oct. 9.
He made the remarks during a press conference in Baku on the bilateral meeting of the representatives of Italian and Azerbaijani companies.
He said that Italy is extremely interested in bringing economic ties with Azerbaijan to a new level.
"We improve and expand our real partnership every year," said Monti. "More recently, a huge deficit was observed in trade between the two countries, but we were able to increase turnover by five times."
He went on to add that Italy intends to support Azerbaijan to diversify its economy through increased investment in the non-oil sector.
"To date, Italy has invested more than $480 million in Azerbaijan's economy, only $120 million of which alone accounted for non-energy sector," said Monti. "We are going to gradually increase investment in the non-oil sector of the economy [of Azerbaijan]."
Between January and August 2015, Italy maintained its first place in the list of foreign trade partners of Azerbaijan with a trade turnover of $1.95 billion, accounting for 13.86 percent of the country's total trade volume, according to a statistic report from Azerbaijani State Customs Committee (SCC).
Edited by CN
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