The following is a longer version of a paper delivered at a conference entitled Armenians and the Left, which took place at CUNY Graduate Center on April 8, 2006, for a panel entitled “Globalization and the Politics of Empire.” The other panel members were Leontina Hormel and the moderator, Levon Chorbajian.

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Reducing Rural Poverty in Armenia by Reducing the Rural Population of Armenia

I want to discuss the fate of rural Armenia in this happy new era of competitive private enterprise. I’ll touch on recent demographic transformations in the countryside and factors that are likely to affect future trends there. But I’ll start with a story that raises an impious doubt about the beneficence of The Market. It’s a true story about a friend of mine, a bright and dedicated--if by now somewhat jaded—American citizen who has been working with NGOs in Armenia since the early 1990s. Let’s call him Jay.

When I spoke with Jay back in 2000, he was working for the United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR), a charitable arm of the Methodist Church USA. In the early 1990s, while land was being privatized and expectations were running high, UMCOR had taken a hard look at poverty reduction in rural Armenia and had come to the conclusion that it would be in the best interest of Armenia’s farmers to form—cooperative farms.(1) It was Jay’s job to show up at farms and, in a heavy American accent, to tell proud new proprietors that they should form cooperatives. By then, of course, cooperative farming was a thoroughly unfashionable policy. But here was an American employee of the Methodist Church, just a couple of years after the collapse of the Evil Empire, echoing the line of Gorbachev-era commissars! To forestall knee-jerk opposition, Jay carefully avoided using the word cooperative (hamagortzakan), and instead used other words to say the same thing.*

Jay’s cooperative farms are a success story, at least so far. He is currently working to build a federatsia, a cooperative of cooperatives, to facilitate such things as input supply, marketing, and microcredit. The federatsia consists of eighteen cooperative farms, representing 3500 farming households. Jay’s work with the cooperatives has provided a livelihood to hundreds of families over the years and has eased much misery.

But what are the long-term prospects for the cooperatives, for Armenia’s small farmers, and for the rural population? The answer to this question might help us to assess the price Armenians are paying for the Freedom and Independence they have been enjoying so thoroughly for the past fifteen years, and the additional price they are likely to pay in the coming years. As a bonus, we might also learn something about the Millennium Challenge Grant—the largest NGO funding program in the country--and its likely effects on the ground, as opposed to its advertised missions.

A decade and a half after Armenia’s return to the Community of Nations, we still hear that the country is in the midst of a “transition” to a market economy. Before considering the “transition” in the countryside, we should survey, at least briefly, several economic and demographic trends that have taken place in Armenia over the course of the past several decades. This exercise will provide insights into the process of class formation in Armenia, and it might provide hints about the fate of the rural population in coming decades.

Armenia was a largely agricultural country until well into the last century. During the Soviet period, however, it became one of the most industrialized republics of the USSR, exporting industrial, military, and high technology goods, mainly to the other Soviet republics, and in turn relying heavily on these other republics for key inputs. By the 1970s and 1980s, non-agricultural industry employed half a million workers in a republic with 3.5 to 3.8 million inhabitants, and accounted for more than two-thirds of Armenia’s net material product.(2)

The seventies and eighties, however, were decades of economic stagnation in the Soviet Union. Long years of declining productivity were billable to institutions and practices of the Soviet order--cumbersome and inefficient central planning commissions, ossified Party structures, “artificial” price controls, isolation from global markets and financial institutions, and so on. Military encirclement and the arms race further drained the All-Union economy, shunting resources from production of consumer goods to the military.

By the late 1980s, after nearly two decades of declining per capita income growth rates, large sections of the privileged and powerful nomenklatura(3) in Russia had become disaffected with the Soviet command economy. Mikhail Gorbachev drew early support from this constituency, as well as from western-oriented academics, journalists, and celebrities. The General Secretary’s policy of perestroika sent the economy into a tailspin of negative growth rates, and as we know, his erstwhile supporters dropped him like a hot potato as soon as Boris Yeltsin’s fortunes rose. In the years since then, the scions of the old nomenklatura have intermittently clashed and coexisted with “New Russian” oligarchs to consolidate their control over post-Soviet institutions, industries, and resources in Russia.

In Armenia, sons of the local nomenklatura and upstart clan leaders have seized privatized assets(4) and extended control over state and private institutions, remaking these institutions in their image, and transforming themselves into a proper ruling class. Until recently, this incipient ruling class has been predominantly “national in form,” but it is increasingly cosmopolitan “in essence.” As Armenia’s rulers discover their role as brokers for international capital, their grandiose oratory is fading out in the halls of power, replaced by the prescribed technocratic mindset and the bland, business-like rhetoric typical of scores of other countries under imperialist tutelage.

For seven decades, an Iron Curtain had separated Armenia’s population from Turkish bayonets, and Armenian markets from Turkish industry. In the years since the Iron Curtain fell and Armenia nestled into the lap of the IMF and the World Bank, the country’s industrial base has been decimated, as inter-republican trade was disrupted, subsidized energy disappeared, credit dried up, and capital flowed out of the country. Mass privatization schemes became extractive industries, effectively strip-mining the country of factories and machinery, and leaving tens of thousands without a livelihood.

As a result of the ensuing unemployment and poverty, Armenia’s population has plummeted. Fifteen years after the oratory in Opera Square--the poems, the anthems, the invocations of Tigran the Great’s glorious reign, the teary-eyed evocations of eternal victimhood, and the angry denunciations of nefarious Bolsheviks who diminished Armenia’s grandeur(5)—fifteen years after Armenians opened their arms wide and showered their returning capitalist saviors with warm wet kisses, Armenia’s population today is around 70% of what it was in 1989,(6) and the number of Armenians in the southern Caucasus is not much more than half of what it used to be. The centuries-old Armenian community of Tiflis has all but died, unnoticed and unmourned. As of this writing, some fifty percent of the diminished population of Armenia lives in poverty, even by official reckoning.(7) Unemployment in the country stands at around thirty percent, at least according to the CIA World Factbook (estimate for 2003).(8) One could recite a long list of sad statistics for fallen marriage and birth rates; higher infant mortality and morbidity rates(9); lower life expectancies(10); higher suicide rates; fallen birth rates, higher infant mortality; higher levels of water contamination, depletion of forests and topsoil, and so on and so forth.(11) And then there are the other under-publicized concomitants of capitalism, including widespread trafficking in women.(12)

“The international community”—that is to say, the IMF, the U.S. Treasury Department, the Heritage Foundation and their minions—have praised Armenia as one of the most thorough privatizers of land among the former Soviet Republics. Armenia was the first of the former Soviet republics to privatize land, starting in 1991, and in 1994, the Ter Petrosyan administration launched a far-reaching IMF-sponsored economic liberalization program. With the breakup of the collective and state farms in the early 90s, farmers among Armenia’s thirty-five percent rural population received a parcel of land that averaged about one hectare in size.(13)

Even under favorable conditions, it would have been difficult to support a household on one hectare of land. But the concomitant disruption of markets and the lack of credit, seed, fodder, fertilizer and fuel plunged these farmers into poverty almost overnight.(14) As Jay learned very quickly, farmers could barely eke out a living on their small plots. Barter largely replaced a cash economy in the countryside. As a large part of the educated urban population has abandoned Armenia, small-scale farming, including near-subsistence farming, has assumed more importance as a percentage of population employed(15) At the same time, however, the villages and small and medium-sized towns have withered, as bread earners have left the countryside in search of jobs.(16)

The clan leaders and big capitalists--the Dodi Gago’s, the Max Group agricultural concern, and other assorted Junior Achievement role models--began buying up farmland at or below market price and combining them into large mechanized farms. They also bought out or negotiated long-term leases for previously uncultivated public land—land that had belonged to the villages even after privatization.(17) As a result, concentration of land ownership has been taking place hand over fist, and a new class of land barons has come into existence. Tens of thousands of near-subsistence farmers remain on the land today, but there is destitution in the countryside—a destitution Armenia has not known since the second decade of the twentieth century.

The “transition” in the countryside is far from complete. Freemarketeers in Yerevan have long wanted to normalize relations with Turkey, to open borders and establish free trade. Once borders with Turkey are opened, we should expect low-priced Turkish produce to flood the market, forcing down prices for domestic produce.(18) Cheap tomatoes and cucumbers will flood across the border, and Armenian consumers will win. Many of the remaining small farmers, unable to compete with mechanized economies of scale across the border, will be forced out of business, sell out their farms, and head for Yerevan, Krasnodar, or farther afield. Whatever their fate, Jay’s cooperatives will wither or transmogrify into privately held capitalist enterprises.

Free trade, we are told, is a win-win game. In the case at hand, the winners will include exporters and consumers in Turkey, who will have access to markets and cheaper goods and services—whether building materials, chemicals, or something else--produced in Armenia at a comparative advantage. Exporters in Armenia will be winners, too, as well as Armenian consumers of low-priced Turkish imports. As we have seen, however, free trade will likely accelerate the processes of urbanization and emigration, along with all of their foreseeable economic, demographic, and strategic consequences. It is hard to see a win-win situation in all of this.

As it turns out, however, there are more imminent threats to the rural population of Armenia than the threat posed by free trade with Turkey. Take the value-added tax. At present, farmers who bring produce to market do not pay such a tax on non-processed goods.(19) In 2008, however, the WTO will require Armenia to impose a twenty percent value-added tax on non-processed agricultural goods. This is likely to put small farmers at an even greater disadvantage relative to the big landowners and vertically integrated agribusiness. If anything, this is likely to further accelerate the exodus from the countryside.

And then there is the Millenium Challenge Grant. On Feb. 27, 2006, representatives of Armenia in Washington DC signed a five-year $235.65 million dollar compact with a federal corporation called the Millenium Challenge Corporation.(20) (Oh yes, it should go without saying that the grant had absolutely nothing at all to do with the Kocharyan administration’s willingness a couple of years earlier to join George Bush’s “Coalition of the Willing” in Iraq.)(21) According to the MCC’s literature, the Millenium Challenge Grant is intended to reduce rural poverty in Armenia by implementing projects in the areas of road construction, irrigation, and agricultural loans. Envisioned improvements to roads and irrigation systems will increase the value of the land, including land that the big landowners already own. Economies of scale, mechanization, and ready credit on favorable terms give the big landowners an advantage over their small farming competition. It appears likely, then, that the Millennium Challenge Grant will accelerate the current process of concentration of land ownership, further exacerbating the plight of the rural population, and convincing ever more farmers to abandon the land sooner rather than later.

Economists have blamed persisting rural poverty for the ever-wider gap between rich and poor in post-“independence” Armenia.(22) With or without the Millennium Challenge Grant, capitalism will continue to reduce rural poverty in Armenia the way it has done in so many other places: capitalism will reduce rural poverty in Armenia by reducing the rural population of Armenia.

This, of course, is “good”: higher productivity of Armenia’s agriculture is inevitable, and the sooner it takes place the better for Armenia’s domestic consumers and for competitiveness. But what of the displaced rural population?

Superficially, Armenia would appear to be following the same path that the wealthiest countries treaded back in the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries. One hundred years ago, for example, the United States was a predominantly agricultural country and most of the population lived in rural areas. Today, by contrast, we are told that only two percent of the population is directly involved in agricultural production. In the United States and other wealthy countries, a much smaller proportion of the population produces far more agricultural output.

In Western Europe and the United States, however, the industrialization of agriculture took place at a time when labor-intensive industrialization was thriving in the cities and mining towns. The landless rural population—and in the case of the United States, a great influx of immigrants, too--had a place to resettle in American cities. In the case of Armenia, by contrast, much of the uprooted population has had to seek work outside the country, and there is little reason to believe that this will change very much, at least in the short-term.

We should expect in the coming years to hear much “economic good news,” from Armenia’s freemarketeers, notably news of rapid economic growth. And when Ronald McDonald at long last sets up shop in Yerevan, the Junior Achievement types will be positively orgasmic. We should not expect to hear much, however, about the fact that the “encouraging trends” are emerging from a country that has already undergone fifteen years of deep class stratification and near-catastrophic emigration. When it comes to the countryside, as we have seen, capitalism is reducing poverty by reducing the rural population. As we have also seen, it is likely that this will exacerbate the problem of emigration from Armenia. A further diminution of Armenia’s population relative to its neighbors in the Caucasus could have far-reaching consequences beyond the purview of economics, narrowly conceived. But that is a topic for a different discussion.

Notes:

1. The brochures and websites of the larger foreign-funded NGOs in Armenia typically intone the catechism of the Free Market. Thus, for example, UMCOR informs us that it is “assisting the people of Armenia as they work to build a democratic and market-oriented society.” (<http://gbgm-umc.org/umcor/caucasus/armenia.stm>, accessed June 15, 2006.) When it comes to practical work on the ground, though, UMCOR and other NGOs have set aside the catch-phrases of "competitive private enterprise" and have sought other solutions to Armenia’s problems. An UMCOR website informs us, for instance, that:

Farmers' organizations bring manifold advantages. In the agricultural sector, producers working as individuals on small plots of land create a small scale subsistence economy. Farmers' organizations (FOs) focus on linking the agricultural production and market activities of producers in order to achieve economies of scale that the farmers would not otherwise be able to achieve alone. FOs […] provide a more sustainable approach to assistance, helping to rebuild the social safety net, encouraging economic growth and, as a result, helping to decrease long-term dependency on external aid contributions. A joint venture of FOs in a federation further intensifies the process of economies of scale and allows farmers to be heard at the regional and national levels. (<http://gbgm-umc.org/umcor/ngo/armenia>, downloaded on June 15, 2006.)

* Foonote added June 2007: Cooperatives, a semiprivate sector created by Mikhail Gorbachev during perestroika to spur economic growth, proved to be an important part of the economy. By January 1, 1990, 4,005 cooperatives in Armenia employed 70,000 people, comprising approximately 6-7 percent of total industrial production. (Sarian, p. 3 of downloaded text.)

2. USAID/Armenia 2004, p. 17. The CIA World Factbook’s 2005 estimate put the total labor force at 1.2 million.

3. For decades, an embryonic class had gestated within the Soviet Union, a group united by power and privilege, and composed of Party insiders, top apparatchiks, managers of large state enterprises, and Kremlin brass. Trotsky called this group ‘the bureaucracy’; Milan Djilas called it the ‘new class,’ and latter observers have dubbed it “the power-wielding class of the nomenklatura .” (Trotsky 1972; Djilas 1957; Daniels 1989, p. 100.) Mikhail Gorbachev received early support from a “cosmopolitan” portion of the nomenklatura in Russia—a portion that notably excluded old-line military brass.

Six years before the final collapse of the USSR, a Marxist academic from the United States, Marcus Pohlmann, described the "nonmeritocratically attained affluence" of a group that he identified as the "power and benefit heirarchies" in Soviet Armenia. These hierarchies in the Armenian SSR would correspond to a local franchise of what others have called the Soviet nomenklatura. In a brief and somewhat choppy article, Pohlmann asked whether their affluence has been "passed along between generations, as in a 'class structure'?" "The answer," he wrote, "would certainly appear to be 'yes.'" (Pohlmann 1985, p. 15.) These hierarchies, which comprised "a corrupted and insulated bureaucratic elite," benefitted at least to some degree from exploitation of the workforce, and because they dominated positions of state power in a "highly centralized bureaucracy," they constituted "a 'rulling class' of sorts." (Ibid., p. 2.) "However," he wrote, "it remains to be seen if it will develop into a [fullblown] political class structure." (Ibid.) A fullblown capitalist class structure has indeed taken form in post-Soviet Armenia, just as Pohlman and others had suggested, and this process is worthy of close study. In any case, it does not appear as though the local nomenklatura played a prominent role in the Karabagh Committee or the Armenian National Movement. Moreover, many of the most notable oligarchs and high-ranking officials in Armenia today (as in several other non-Russian former Soviet Republics) do not appear to be scions of the nomenklatura. (Sarian, pp. 1-2 of downloaded text. A review of the biographies of the leaders of the dozen or so members of the Karabagh Committee and of leading personalities within the Armenian National Movement will bear out this point.)

4. For a slightly more detailed description of this process, see Melkonian 2001.

5. A well-known public figure, Raffi Hovannisian, for example, has claimed that Armenia’s inclusion in the “Soviet Empire” helps explain why the country is a “rump in modern times.” (Noyan Tapan: The Highlights, May 8, 2006, p. 4.) Hovannisian is a resident of Yerevan, a modern city of one million inhabitants that was constructed during the Soviet Period.

6. The CIA Factbook 2005 estimates Armenia’s population in July 2005 as 2,982,904, registering a net loss of one-quarter of the country’s population in one and one-half decades.

7. Taking the former Soviet Republics as a whole, the number of people living in so-designated “poverty” rose from 14 million in 1989 to 147 million even prior to the crash of the rouble in 1998. (Onnik Krikorian, “Life after Communism [sic!]: The Facts,” downloaded from Armenian News Network/Groong, on April 21, 2004. Krikorian cites: Stephen Cohen, Failed Crusade, New York, Norton, 2001.) (Massive emigration and Armenia’s brain hemorrhage, together with the decline in public education* makes the remaining population even poorer than they otherwise would be. (* See, for example: Astghik Bedevian, “New Minister Alarmed By Declining Education Standards,” RFE/RL Armenia Report, June 13, 2006. Downloaded from Groong, June 13, 2006.) These developments will have repercussions that might not be apparent at first glance. “Human capital,” the economists tell us, “conveys positive externalities”: a highly educated population generates new ideas about how best to produce goods and services. This raises overall productivity, and living standards—at least according to the simplistic and widely disconfirmed assumptions of the freemarketeers!

9. A 1994 estimate puts infant mortality rates at 27.1 per 1,000 live births. (CIA World Facts, 1994.)

10. According to published figures, Male life expectancy declined from 64.2 years in 1989 to 59.8 in 1999, while female life expectancy dropped from 74.5 to 72.8 years. (Onnik Krikorian, “Life after Communism [sic!]: The Facts,” downloaded from Armenian News Network/Groong, on April 21, 2004. Krikorian cites: Martin McCauley, Bandits, Gangsters, and the Mafia, London, Longman, 2001.)

11. For figures and references up to 1996, see Melkonian 1997. A plethora of more recent figures are available online.

12. “Authorities reported the country is a source and transit point for women and girls trafficked primarily for sexual exploitation to the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Russia, Uzbekistan, Greece, and other European countries.” (U.S. Department of State, Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, released by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, March 8, 2006, www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2005/61635.htm. Downloaded March 23, 2006. Also see, for example, <http:gvnet.com/humantrafficking/Armenia.htm> and < http://aramanoogian.blogspot.com/2006/06/armenian-prosecutor-alarmed-by-human.html>) With the demise of the Evil Empire, “the first Christian nation,” is now free to realize its inborn entrepreneurial talents. True to the market-driven ideals that Junior Achievement has helped promote in Armenia, industrious pimps have recognized Armenia’s comparative advantage in the lucrative export-oriented service industry of prostitution, and have established Armenia’s reputation throughout the Caucasus and the Middle East as a source of a high-quality service at a low price. The impoverished small towns and villages of Armenia appear to have provided most of the recruits for human trafficking. (Baghdasaryan and Manoogian, pp. 4,10, 23, etc.)

13. CIA 2006 categorizes only 17.55% of Armenia’s land as “arable.”

14. Dudwick Pt.II, p. 11; interview with Yenikomshian. According to government statistics, half of Armenia’s population lives in poverty, and 17% of these live in extreme poverty. (Onnik Krikorian, “An Underclass Emerges in Post-Independent Armenia,” Asbarez, March 6, 2004, pp. 1, 14.)

15. Central Intelligence Agency 2006: “Since the implosion of the USSR in December 1991, Armenia has switched to small-scale agriculture away from the large agroindustrial complexes of the Soviet era.”

16.CIA World Facts, 1994 published the following breakdown of the labor force for 1992: 34% industry and construction; 31% agriculture and forestry; 35% other. According to the CIA World Factbook for 2006, the agricultural sector accounts for an estimated 45% of the labor force by occupation (2002 estimate), but it accounts for only 19.8% of Armenia’s GDP.

Reviewing the record, one gets the impression that few of the anti-Soviet demonstrators in Opera Square even considered the possibility that such a process might take place in Armenia. But it did not take a genius to foresee that it would in fact take place. Consider one university student, writing in 1991:

If the Soviet Union undergoes all-union privatization, labor will suddenly find itself “freed” from the Soviet passport system of work and residence controls, and will begin to find its way toward sources of employment—a pattern repeated dozens of time elsewhere in the Third World, and always taking the form of vast, destabilizing rural-to-urban outmigrations. (Lyday, p. 23.)

17. Interview with Alec Yenikomshian; interview with Jeff Kalousdian.

18. Last year, a director of the Armenian-European Policy and Legal Advice Centre (AEPLAC) reported on an attempt, based on quantitative analysis using a Computable General Equilibrium model, to foresee what sorts of trade and economic developments should be expected from opening the Turkish-Armenian borders. AEPLAC’s forecast was in line with the conclusions of other attentive observers: transportation costs to markets in both directions will fall, since trade will no longer have to be routed through Georgia, and turnover volumes will increase. As a result, prices for Turkish goods in domestic markets will “considerably decrease.”

In the long-run, it is obvious that the Armenian and Turkish markets will become interconnected. Armenian producers will have to start competing with Turkish producers, which in the long-run will contribute to the modernization of Armenian enterprises and rising productivity. Armenian producers will have every opportunity to effectively enter the Turkish markets. This means that there is a possibility of changes in the export structure in favour of "heavy" commodities (for example, construction materials, chemicals and electrical power). (PFP, p. 9).

19. As of this writing, the value added tax is the Republic of Armenia’s large revenue item, contributing more than one-third of the budget revenue. (<www.tacentral.com/economy.asp?story_no=9>, downloaded June 26, 2006. For more about the value-added tax in Armenia, see: www.armeniaemb.org/BusinessEconomy/TaxCustoms/Taxes/IndirectTaxes.htm.; <www.businessarmenia.com/Law_on_VAT.pdf>.)

20. The Millenium Challenge Corporation (MCC), founded in 2002, is a federal corporation managed by a CEO appointed by U.S. President Bush. The MCC handles development assistance “provided to those countries that rule justly, invest in their people and encourage economic freedom.” (According to the homepage statement on the MCC website, www.mcc.gov..) The MCC advertises itself as reducing poverty through Economic Growth, which in turn is attainable by increasing “inflows of private capital and increased trade.” In 2005, the MCC Board of Directors selected seventeen out of sixty-four beneficiary states as eligible for funding under the Millennium Challenge Account. These countries are: Armenia, Benin, Bolivia, Cape Verde, Georgia, Ghana, Honduras, Lesotho, Madagascar, Mali, Mongolia, Morocco, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Senegal, Sri Lanka, and Vanuatu.

The MCC is managed by a Chief Executive Officer appointed by the US President, confirmed by the Senate and overseen by a Board of Directors composed of the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Treasury, the U.S. Trade Representative, the Administrator of USAID, the CEO of the MCC and four public members, appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate. The Secretary of State is the Chair of the Board and the Secretary of Treasury is the Vice Chair.

21. Needless to say, Armenian membership in George Bush’s Coalition had nothing to do with bribery: for one thing, any visitor to Yerevan will have noticed that officialdom in Armenia, from the bottom to the top, is impervious to bribery. For another thing, Armenia has been afflicted with too many mine sappers and not enough mines on their borders to disarm. So officials in Yerevan--who appear to be every bit as worried about democracy in Iraq as they are about unemployment in Armenia--decided to send their underemployed sappers to Iraq. But all of this in a “non-military capacity,” of course. For a revealing documentation of Armenia’s entry into the Coalition of the Willing, go to http://www.mybrothersroad.com/PAGES/moreinfo.html, and then click on the “Armenian and the Coalition of the Willing” link.

22. Not long ago, David A. Grigorian, an economist at the IMF, registered “Armenia’s markedly improved macroeconomic situation” in the late 1990’s, but also noted that “the challenge of income distribution stemmed from the persistent steady rural poverty in Armenia.” Ugurlayan, Anahid and Gevorkyan, Alec, “Grigorian Discusses Economy with New York Armenians,” The Armenian Weekly (June 4, 2005), p. 6. Grigorian’s remark is not uncommon in the literature.

Adalian, Roupen (ed.). Armenian & Karabagh Factbook. Washington DC: Armenian Assembly of America, 1996.

Armenian Authorities, in collaboration with the staffs of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. “Republic of Armenia: Policy Framework Paper, 1996-1998.” January 22, 1996. (Incomplete publication information.)

Aleskanyan, Arutyun. “New Perspectives on Armenian NGOs,” in Hye Sharzhoom, October 2002.

Baghdasaryan, Edik and Manoogian, Ara. Desert Nights (second ed.). Yerevan: Gasprint/Investigative Journalists, Hetq Online, 2006.

Baghdoyan, Armen. Armenia and Nagorno Karabagh: Problems of Security and Development. Belmont, Mass.: Self-published monograph, 1998.

Berberoglu, Berch. Globalization of Capital and the Nation-State, Lenham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.

-----------. “ Globalization and the Contradictions of Development in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union: Prospects for Post-Soviet Development in the Age of Globalization” Canadian Journal of Development Studies , Vol. XXVI , No. 4, 2005, pp. 835-846.

Bhagwati, Jagdish. In Defense of Globalization. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

BISNIS. “Energy Sector Profile—Armenia.” Yerevan: Business Information Service for the Newly Independent States, February 4, 1997.

BISNIS. “Armenia: Economic and Trade Overview.” Yerevan: Business Information Service for the Newly Independent States, June 1997.

CEPRA. “Mass Privatisation of Enterprises in the Republic of Armenia: An Early Assessment.” College Park, Maryland: Center for Economic Policy Research and Analysis, (1997?).

Central Intelligence Agency. CIA World Factbook: Armenia. http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/am.html#Intro. Downloaded April 1, 2006.

Danaher, Kevin (ed.). 50 Years Is Enough: The Case against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Boston: South End Press, 1994.

Daniszewski, John. “A Desperate, Destitute Nation Deserts Itself,” Los Angeles Times, April 30, 2001, pp. A1, A6, A7.

Djilas, Milovan. The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System. London: Thames & Hudson, 1957.

Dobbs, Michael. “The Politics of Compassion: Aid Abroad is Business Back Home: Washington firms Profit from Overseas Projects,” Washington Post Foreign Service, January 26, 2001, p. AO1.

Donabedian, Patrick and Mutafian, Claude. The Caucasian Knot: The History and Geo-Politics of Nagorno-Karabagh (trans. and ed., Levon Chorbajian). London and New Jersey: Zed Books, 1994.

Dudwick, Nora. “The Mirage of Democracy: A Study of Post Communist Transition in Armenia.” Asbarez Daily. Pt. I, Sept. 28, 1996, pp. 2, 10-11; Pt. II, Oct. 5, 1996, pp. 2, 10-11.

European Union. “Armenian-European Policy and Legal Advice Centre Presented ‘Economic Impact on the Armenian Economy from Re-Opening of the Turkish-Armenian Borders,’” European Union in Armenia Newsletter (No. 4 (26) July-August 2005), 2-3.

Goltz, Thomas. “Remembering a Winter of Discontent: Letter from the South Caucasus.” Provocations (The Washington Quarterly, Summer 2000), Vol. 23, No. 3.

Gorbachev, Mikhail S. Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World. New York: Harper and Row, 1988.

Government of the Republic of Armenia. “Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper.” (Incomplete publication information.)

Grigorian, Marianna. “How’s Life?” in AGBU Magazine, Vol. 13, No. 2 (November 2003), pp. 13-14. Stats on emigration, unemployment, poverty levels, etc. Check this issue of the magazine for other relevant articles.

Hekimian Arzoumanian, Kim. “Infant Nutrition and Foreign Aid: Changes in Postpartum Practices and Improvements in Breastfeeding in Armenia,” in Armenian Forum, No.2 (Summer 1998), pp. 1-15.

Hunter, Shireen T. The Transcaucasus in Transition: Nation-Building and Conflict. Washington, DC: The Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1994.

Karanian, Matthew and Kurkjian, Robert. The Stone Garden Guide to Armenia & Karabagh. Los Angeles and Yerevan: Stone Garden Productions, 2004. (More than just a travel guide, this book includes an excellent--and somewhat alarming--section on ecology in Armenia (pp. 77-105), written by co-author Kurkjian, an environmental consultant with a Ph.D. in geochemistry.)

Krikorian, Onnik. Armenia. UNICEF/Armenia, 2005. Downloaded from ArmeniaNow.com, Jan. 25, 2006.

--------. “An Underclass Emerges in Post-Independent Armenia,” Asbarez, March 6, 2004, pp. 1, 14.

Kurkchiyan, Marina. “Health Care in Armenia: The Human Cost of the Transition,” CACP Briefing Number 16. London: The Royal Institute of International Affairs, March 1998.

Libaridian, Jirair (ed.). Armenia at the Crossroads: Democracy and Nationhood in the Post-Soviet Era. Watertown, Massachusetts: Blue Crane Books, 1991.

Lyday, Corbin. “The Iron Curtain Moves East: Russia’s Emerging ‘Market Authoritarianism’.” Unpublished manuscript, May 1991.

Meguerian, Barbara J. and Jafferian, Doris D. (eds.). Armenian Women in a Changing World: Papers Presented at the First International Conference of the Armenian International Women’s Association (September 19-21, 1994). Belmont, Massachusetts: AIWA Press, 1995.

Perkins, John. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2004.

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Interviews:

Jeff Kalousdian, interview with author, March 27, 2006 in Glendale, California.

Alec Yenikomshian, telephone discussion with author, April 4, 2006.

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