By Andranik Aboyan
Last summer we spoke about the kind of silence that statistics create. That silence has grown more sophisticated since then. The numbers now arrive with a built-in defense: a slight improvement, a hint of motion, enough to suggest that history is moving in the right direction and that impatience is the only real enemy.
According to the National Statistical Committee, Armenia’s official poverty rate has fallen to about 22 percent. A year ago it stood at 23.7. In 2021 it was 26.4. On a chart, the line descends in small, careful steps. In the government’s 2021 program, that line was supposed to drop much faster. The pledge was unambiguous: poverty cut in half by 2026. That means a target somewhere around 13 percent. We are almost at the end of 2025, and the distance between 22 and 13 stretches out like an unbuilt road.
When Prime Minister Pashinyan appeared in parliament in late October, he did not speak about that road. He spoke about the past. Previous governments, he said, “destroyed the schools.” No timetable, no list of closures, no data on demolished buildings or cancelled programs. Just a phrase, thrown at the opposition benches and left hanging in the session hall.
The accusation serves two purposes. It shifts responsibility for today’s poverty figures onto yesterday’s rulers, and it turns education into a kind of metaphysical explanation for everything. If the schools were destroyed, then the country produces people who cannot compete; if people cannot compete, they stay poor; if they stay poor, the numbers refuse to obey the five-year plan. The logic is circular enough to move without evidence.
There is another side to this narrative. Pashinyan has repeated more than once that low-income Armenians tend to be poorly educated. He has suggested that many of them do not want to work. The poor appear as a moral category, not a social one. They lack discipline, drive, awareness. They live in the wrong way.
Official data quietly dismantles this picture. Nineteen percent of employed citizens fall below the poverty line. They get up, go to work, come home, and still count as poor. More than 100,000 people with university degrees live in poverty. They sat through lectures, passed exams, collected diplomas. Their reward now is a place in the lower bands of the income table.
The government likes to talk about “human capital.” In practice, it presides over a situation where human capital comes at a discount. The market buys it cheaply, the state taxes it reliably, and public rhetoric treats it as a personal failure when it does not produce comfort.
Behind this sits the structure of the post-2022 boom. Armenia has grown on paper. The source is no secret: the re-export of Western goods to Russia under sanctions. Trucks move, customs stamps papers, banks process payments, a layer of intermediaries takes its cut. This circuit has beneficiaries. They appear in boardrooms, at conferences, in friendly interviews. They describe the current moment as a historic opportunity.
For a large part of the country, the opportunity remains an abstraction. Re-export-led growth does not automatically raise village wages or urban pensions. It enriches those positioned along the corridor. The state then points to the corridor and calls it the national economy.
Here the issue of pensions becomes a sharp edge. In 2021, the same program that promised to halve poverty also promised to raise the average pension to the minimum cost of living. That benchmark is not a dream. It is a basket: food, utilities, basic goods. Today the average pension stands at around 49,000 drams. The World Bank and the Armenian Health Ministry estimate the minimum consumer basket at 61,000 and 76,000 drams.
The gap is not theoretical. It is the difference between heating and no heating for part of the month; between full prescriptions and cut pills; between fresh fruit as a regular item and as a holiday event. Every month, pensioners receive an official message in the form of a bank transfer: the state acknowledges that this amount does not reach the minimum for survival, and pays it anyway.
When the same state then suggests that poverty persists because the poor are lazy or uneducated, something darker comes into view. The problem stops being the wage structure, the tax system, the model of growth, the abandonment of industrial policy, the neglect of public services. The problem becomes the character of the poor themselves.
This move has a long history. It appears whenever governments want the prestige of social concern without the cost of social transformation. The figures about poverty are published; the language of “targeted support” and “vulnerable groups” is deployed; the moral judgment slips in almost unnoticed. Armenians who work and still remain below the line are told, implicitly, that they stand there because of their own inadequacy, not because entire sectors of the economy run on low wages and short contracts.
Meanwhile, the official targets stay on the books. The promise to halve poverty by 2026 still exists as text. The pledge to align pensions with the minimum cost of living still exists as text. In practice, both have been converted into something closer to decoration. They adorn speeches, reports, presentations to donors. They do not discipline policy.
The country is asked to make peace with this gap between writing and reality. A small reduction in the poverty rate is presented as confirmation that the general course is correct, because the line at least points downward. To question the pace or the distribution of gains is treated as impatience, or as sabotage.
Yet the question remains: what counts as success if a fifth of the population lives below a line that already understates the cost of staying alive? What counts as responsibility if the blame for this situation is redirected onto “destroyed schools” and “lazy citizens,” rather than onto decisions taken in the last seven years?
The June numbers told a story about growth that passed by the unemployed and the underpaid. The new figures add another layer. The government no longer speaks only through charts and averages. It speaks through judgments about the people who inhabit the lower part of those charts. It demands gratitude for slow improvement and obedience from those left behind.
Statistics will continue to move, up and down. Targets will continue to be written. The real question now sits elsewhere: how long can a government define poverty as a personal defect while failing to meet its own promises on pensions, wages, and social protection? And how long will a society accept that explanation from leaders who have had power long enough to do more than point at somebody else’s ruins?
