Chairman of CBA: Inflationary expectations low in Azerbaijan

Inflation in Azerbaijan is below the target level set by both the government and the Central Bank of Azerbaijan (CBA), Chairman of the CBA Elman Rustamov said at a meeting chaired by President Ilham Aliyev related to the socio-economic sphere, Trend reports.

In light of unprecedented social measures, the strengthening of social policies and the expansion of domestic demand, the inflation rate remains low, which stems from a general improvement in economic management and stability of the manat, Rustamov noted.

"Inflationary expectations play a very important role in managing inflation. Together with the State Statistical Committee, we conducted surveys in more than 4,000 households. Overall, the number of people expecting inflation to accelerate by the end of the year makes up 2 percent – that is to say, 98 percent of the population do not believe that it will grow by the end of the year,” Rustamov said, adding that the belief in macroeconomic stability in business is generally quite high.

Given the low inflation rate, the CBA is consistently taking steps to ease monetary policy. "We have reduced the discount rate from 18 percent in 2018 to 8.25 percent," he said.

According to him, another direction of monetary policy is quantitative easing – in other words, the amount of money that the CBA provides to the economy, which this year amounted to 9 percent.

Over the past two years, the main index, denoted as "monetary base”, has grown by more than 37 percent. This is supposed to stimulate the economy in conditions of low inflation in general, and to increase lending activity so that banks can have enough of their own resources and can use these funds, Rustamov concluded.