From the Editors 10

From the Editors (Summer 2003)

This past year we were pleased to discover a new organization, the Armenian International Policy Research Group. It consists of highly educated professionals—many of them part of the brain drain from Armenia, many employed by powerful Washington outfits like the Department of the Treasury and the World Bank—who choose to apply their skills and some of their time to the considerable policy research needs of Armenia and the Armenian diaspora. Since this journal was established in part to address these same needs, we are excited to see this group at work.

In January the group held a well-attended conference at the World Bank. The papers were primarily on economic and foreign policy. Some were quite technical; others readily accessible to nonspecialists. Each paper had an assigned discussant, among them senior analysts from the outfits mentioned above. The quality of the papers and formal comments was uneven, but they included some gems. The organizers did give room to critics of the Washington Consensus (the failed policies imposed by Washington on poor countries), but the one or two papers in that category were, unfortunately, in an early stage of development.

A keynote address at lunch was memorable in an ironic way. It was a good example of the problem with many foreign consultants commissioned to do a stint for Armenia. The speaker, then a senior vice president at the United States Chamber of Commerce, had obviously spent no time studying or thinking about Armenia. He gave what must have been his “Speech to Groups from Developing Countries” talk, which was about the reforms a developing country needs to make to break into the United States market. As an afterthought he allowed that Armenia has no chance of doing so even if it implements the reforms he advocated.

Among the more interesting offerings at the conference was a paper by two of the organizers, Alec Gevorkyan and David Grigorian. A revised version of the paper appears in this issue. The authors argue that the diaspora must move from humanitarian support for Armenia and Gharabagh to various forms of investment. Without such investment, they argue, Armenia’s economy is highly unlikely ever to grow fast enough for the country to prosper. They explore various modes of investment—from immigration (the investment of human capital, as it were) to a mutual-fund-type investment pool, to a development bank. They also consider a diaspora bonds program, which, as they point out, invests in the public rather than the private sector. We would welcome letters and articles responding to their offering and furthering the discussion.

Another of the more interesting presentations at the conference was by Annette N. Brown. She examined Armenia’s tax system in the context of poverty reduction. Although Armenia’s tax system is designed to be progressive (those with lower incomes are taxed at lower rates than those with higher incomes), in practice there are several problems, which Brown identifies. She draws on surveys in which thousands of people keep a diary of their income and expenditures for thirty days. A version of the paper appears in this issue.

Armenia’s per capita gross domestic product is back at its pretransition level, a senior World Bank analyst noted at the AIPRG conference.¹ Also in this issue, the photojournalist Onnik Krikorian shows what that statistic obscures. Noting that most people in Armenia struggle below the country’s poverty line (and a significant percentage below the starvation line), Krikorian takes us into the lives of ordinary Armenians.

Two of the contributions to this issue of Armenian Forum are concerned with creative expression as a way of overcoming the traumatic legacy of the Armenian Genocide. One is a review of a compact disk that “acknowledges the memory of the victims of the Genocide not through a mourning of the lives they lost, but through a celebration of the country they will always represent.”

The other is an interpretation of Atom Egoyan’s Ararat. Philosopher Stefen Kristensen argues that Egoyan’s “fundamental thesis is that the memory of violence is itself a source of violence, . . . and that the only way of breaking through this cycle is creativity.” The creative process, according to Kristensen, helps people make sense of reality and accept it.

Also exploring the creative process is an essay by the novelist Nancy Kricorian. She offers illuminating insights into the commercial aspects of her profession before taking the reader along as she prepares to write her next novel.

We are grateful to Dr. and Mrs. R. A. Hovanessian of Indiana, to Garo Keheyan of Cyprus, to an anonymous donor, to Michael Bobelian of New York, and to Antranik Bobelian of New York for generous gifts in support of Armenian Forum.

¹ The leftist economist Ara Khanjian wondered why the bank insists on 1991 as a benchmark, when the economic decline began much earlier. Would 1985, when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev began adopting the free-market policies advocated by the West, not be a fairer benchmark? [back]