DUSHANBE, November 13, 2008, Asia-Plus — Among the CIS countries, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Moldova that “live within the natural economy” have been less affected by the global financial crisis, Russia’s
Novaya Gazeta
(New Newspaper) reported on November 13, referring to Vladimir Zharikhin, deputy director of the CIS Institute (Moscow).
According to him, the countries that were constructing less suffered less, however, the second wave of the crisis, when demand for natural resources and food decrease, will catch these countries.
Novaya Gazeta
cited Andrei Suzdaltsev of Higher School of Economics in Moscow as saying that the crisis had hit all the CIS states irrespective of peculiarities of their economies and banking system.
“The crisis has shown itself both in the countries, where state’s share in the banking system prevails, for example Belarus where state’s chare accounts for 71 percent or Turkmenistan and Tajikistan where it exceeds 90 percent and in the countries like Ukraine and Moldova, where major part of the banking system does not belong to state or even belongs to foreign capital,” Suzdaltsev was quoted as saying.
Commenting on these statements, Dr. Hojimuhammad Umarov of the Institute for Economic Studies within the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade (MoEDT), noted that effects of the global financial crisis had already reached Tajikistan.
“We are currently receiving information about reduction of the volume of remittances from Tajik labor migrants working in the Russian Federation, where many of our fellow-countrymen working in the construction sector have been dismissed on grounds of redundancy,” Professor Umarov noted.
After a while prices of basic food products will rise in the country, Tajik expert said. “Prices of fuel and food products will still be coming down but with the lapse of time, when the volume of production of these goods is reduced globally, the prices will rise,” Umarov said.
