Not about 74 thousand, but 50 thousand 676: Kerobyan's Wrong Claim about the Number of New Jobs

On November 30, RA Economy Minister Vahan Kerobyan stated in an interview to First Channel that “many jobs have been created” in the country.

“I looked into the figures before coming here, roughly 74,000 new jobs were created over 2 years,” Kerobyan specifically said.

Fact Investigation Platform studied the job data for the last two years and revealed that the Minister of Economy is wrong.

Thus, the latest publication of the Statistical Committee of Armenia on the labor market summarizes the January-September period of the year 2022.

According to these preliminary data, in September 2022, there were 699,319 registered employees in Armenia.

FIP.am compared this index with the data of the same period of September 2020 and revealed that at that time there were 648,673 registered employees in Armenia.

In fact, compared to September 2020, the number of registered employees in the respective period of 2022 increased by 50,676, not by 74,000, as claimed by Kerobyan.

It should also be noted that such an increase in the number of registered employees still does not mean that the specified number of new jobs has been created in Armenia over these two years, as part of this data reflects the jobs brought to the tax field from the shadow economy. Officials and experts have repeatedly addressed this issue. About a month ago, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan once again spoke about the issue.

“We can state that since 2018, 108,000 new jobs have appeared, have been created and come out of the shadow economy in Armenia. Unfortunately, I reiterate, we do not have the methodology to clearly distinguish between the newly created jobs and the ones that come out of the shadow economy, and so on,” said the Prime Minister.

Thus, Kerobyan’s claim that 74,000 new jobs were created over two years is wrong. The number of registered employees in 2022 compared to 2020 has increased not by 74,000, but by about 51,000. The above-mentioned claim of the Minister of Economy is also questionable as the Government has not revealed how many of the mentioned jobs were newly created and how many were brought out of the shadow economy.

Statistics for the last 4 years

Although the data presented by Kerobyan differ from the data published by the Statistical Committee, there is still a positive dynamic. For comparison, we can assume the number of registered jobs for the years 2018-2022 as of September of each year.

Thus, in the specified period of 2018, there were 578,593 registered jobs in Armenia, in 2019 – 614,459, in 2020 – 648,673, in 2021– 666,775, and in 2022 – 699,319 registered jobs.