As the city swelters, a girl in the five-foot-high foam iPhone costume tries not to wilt. Parading around the Kentron district of Yerevan, home to such luxury shops as Armani and Burberry, she aims to appeal to those affluent Armenians whose choice of phone is not merely a status symbol, but a statement of intent. Can this really be the heart of one of the world’s worst performing economies?
It is if Forbes magazine’s July 2011 ranking is to be believed: Armenia, it said, has the second worst economy in the world, behind only Madagascar. A relative rather than absolute measure, Forbes focused on the economy’s performance over the past three years. The reaction among Armenia’s politicians ranged from disbelief to fury. A stung Ministry of Finance made its own calculations, coming to quite different conclusions; Forbes’ assessment, it asserted, must have been based on incorrect data. More likely, the difference was one of methodology. Either way, it has been a tumultuous period for the Armenian economy, whose reliance on the country's diaspora heightens its vulnerability to external shock.
