The following is an Armenian government press release.

On the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan today attended a panel discussion, referred to as “Shaping the Future of Democracy.”

Colombian President Iván Duque Márquez, Nepal’s Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli, New York Times publisher Arthur Gregg Sulzberger and Director of Management Today project Daniella Ballou-Aares were among the keynote speakers. Martin Wolf, Deputy Editor and Chief Economist for The Financial Times magazine, acted as the moderator.

Answering Martin Wolf’s question, Nikol Pashinyan noted that parliamentary elections were held in Armenia a month ago, which were assessed as free, democratic and transparent.

“And now as we have recorded great success in the field of democracy, we are facing serious challenges, and the biggest challenge is to empower our democracy economically. You may know that we had a big problem for a long time because of electoral bribes that people were forced to take due to their poor living standards. Of course, the revolution liberated people from that obligation. But now we have to make our citizens even stronger and more independent in economic terms.

We know that there is small and medium-sized business, but we are going to create a new category like micro business and get it rid of taxes in the hope that we will be able to encourage our people by making it clear that overcoming poverty is not only the task of the government: they themselves will have to do something, too. We want to encourage our people by providing opportunities to curb their own poverty.

Thus, my answer is as follows: the greatest challenge is to strengthen our democracy economically, and we hope to attract new foreign investments because we have been able to fight corruption, reinstate the rule of law, and we are going to simplify the regulations in order to attract more investments,” Nikol Pashinyan said.

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