Year after Devaluation - Central Bank Has Not Reached Its Goals - Samir Aliyev

The Azerbaijani Central Bank has not reached the goals that were declared at the time of the transition to a floating exchange rate of the national currency on December 21, 2015, the economist Samir Aliyev said.

On his profile on Facebook, referring to the results of the past year, with the transition to a floating exchange rate of the manat, the expert recalled that the Central Bank had set three objectives - balancing the balance of payments, saving the critical level of foreign exchange reserves of the country, and ensuring the international competitiveness of the national economy.

Aliyev noted they were not able to maintain foreign exchange reserves at a critical level. The Central Bank to keep the exchange rate of the manat donated 20% of the reserves and the past year's currency reserves decreased from $ 5 billion to $ 4 billion.

The international competitiveness of the national economy was not provided. He stressed that the level of foreign trade shows that exports in the non-oil sector did not increase, moreover they decreased. For 11 months the foreign trade turnover decreased by 23.4% - 347 million dollars.

They were also unable to balance the balance of payments. In the first nine months of 2016 the deficit in the current account balance amounted to 1.1 billion dollars, whereas before the transition to a floating exchange rate deficit was 222.5 million dollars. The total deficit for the past year amounted to 9.141 billion dollars. “If you do not take into account some technical procedures, from the point of view of financial stability, nothing fundamental had happened. The exchange rate is not established on the basis of the results of the exchange auction, but at the discretion of the Central Bank, which gives grounds to say that the current exchange rate policy is no different from previous policy. The sale of foreign currency is held not on the open currency exchange, but on the closed platform Bloomberg, which has led to a reduction of market players,” he said. ------71D