A non-technical take on possible economic measures in the wake of Armenia’s humanitarian crisis

Abstract

In thinking about an opening statement for this brief sketch of ideas, I wondered about possible examples of economic responses to refugee crises like what Armenia is experiencing now, with over 100,000 people forced their homeland of the unrecognized, but until recently de facto self-governing, Republic of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh). The scale of the human tragedy and the volume of intentional suffering that has befallen upon ethnic Armenians, just in this century, are not conceivable to today’s human intellect, even one that may have trained itself how to cope with constant tragedy and pain across the world.

So regarding examples, there are many of them, and so are the economic policy lessons in each case. To illustrate just a few and help guide the reader through the list of economic measures suggested below, consider just some of the events in the massive ocean of past and ongoing devastating refugee crises. We learn from the early days of the First Republic of Armenia that worsening humanitarian risks, poverty, and hunger can be allowed to continue if funding is insufficient and administrative resolve is limited for immediate, broad economic provisions. Similarly, Armenia in the late 1980s and early 1990s, yet again weak in economic, social, and political terms amid the downfall of the centralized system of the Soviet Union and the breakout of the First Karabakh War, was unable to fully absorb and provide a path to integration for hundreds of thousands of ethnic Armenian refugees from Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh. Many ended up moving to other countries.

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