6.7 billion USD was invested in Turkey’s economy by foreign investors last year.
While European countries poured more than 4.2 billion dollars into the Turkish economy in total, Azerbaijan trailed not far behind, investing more than 650 million dollars.
Economist Nemat Aliyev says that the reason for the surge in investments is because of the relative attractiveness of the Turkish economy in comparison to the Azerbaijani economy, which has lost steam in recent years :
“In the past 2 years, the devaluation of the manat, attacks on entrepreneurs,
the consistent breach of human rights and freedoms and a lack of an independent judiciary system has made these issues more glaring. As a result, local investors began withdrawing their money out of Azerbaijan towards the end of 2014. They don’t want to loose everything they have in the blink of an eye. And so, they make investments in neighboring countries, especially in Georgia and Turkey”.
Nemat Aliyev says that the amount of local investments in Azerbaijan has decreased from 16.2 billion dollars to 3.7 billion dollars in the past 2 years:
“I wonder – where does this extra capital flow? Certainly it doesn’t lie still. Entrepreneurs know this as well. Anyone involved in investment would want to direct their finances to greener fields. And they see no such pastures in Azerbaijan, and so they take their money out of the country and bring it somewhere else. And Turkey is one of those countries. I’m sure that Azerbaijan will be leading in the Georgian statistics as well. Because in both countries, economic situation is better than in Azerbaijan. If you have a look at the summary indicators of the years, you can surely notice a 19-20 percent of decrease in investment made in Azerbaijani economy by foreigners. This means foreign investments were sucked out of the country in the same way”.
Aliyev also touched on the recent Moody’s Investors Service report, which decreased Azerbaijan’s credit ratings.
“Azerbaijan went down in the ratings, but the government seems not to realize just how serious this is. It must understand that these international ratings are life compasses for foreign investors”.
