Azerbaijan, Baku, Oct. 5 / Trend N. Ismayilova /
The Caucasus and Central Asian countries have been severely affected by the global financial crisis and in the aggregate for that group of countries, their growth has dropped from over 6.5 percent in 2008 to 1.5 percent in 2009, Masood Ahmed, Director of the IMF Middle East and Central Asia Department said at the news conference on results of annual IMF and WB meeting.
According to Ahmed, the broad distinction is that the energy exporters in the region have done reasonably well and the energy importing countries have been particularly badly hit.
Regarding Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, they have all managed to weather the impact reasonably well. They are projected to grow by between 4 and 8 percent this year, despite a severe drop in exports. And as I said, in all of these cases, this has been made possible because they had ample public savings which they use to counter effect the consequence of the global crisis.
The exception is Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan, which has in fact had a very significant and substantial anti-crisis program, is still facing virtually no growth, maybe even a small contraction of its economy this year, which is a result of a combination of being hit both by the oil crisis and by a banking crisis, which it has had and which it has been dealing with, Ahmed said.
"All of these energy exporting economies are expected to benefit from the recovery of energy demand, and we should see again growth in the positive territory for them," the director said.
There is a much sharper impact on the energy importers in the region, Armenia, Georgia, Tajikistan, and the Kyrgyz Republic. In particular, the biggest effect has been on Armenia where output is going to fall by about 15 percent, Ahmed added.
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