Armenia's Tourism Ranks 74th Worldwide

Maybe those nifty television advertisements didn't do the trick.

Armenia is the 74-th of 124 states in the international tourism rating list. Armenia is the third most popular tourist site among the CIS states and has disadvantage of only Georgia (the 66-th) and Russia (68-th).

The competitiveness of countries in the tourism sphere is defined by three main parameters – corresponding legislation, business area and infrastructures and human, culture and natural resources.

Armenia’s competitiveness mainly suffers from visa regime with the states whose citizens go touring most frequently, problems with nature protection, lack of local air and vehicle transportation infrastructures, etc.

The source also mentions that Switzerland is ranked first, while Chad is last.

I figure a good start would be to offer international-friendly tours to popular destinations. Oh, and fixing of the pot holes!

Source: Azg

Armenian Football / Soccer Ranks 123rd!

What happened, guys?

FIFA made public the list of the football national teams. Armenia continues in the 123rd place.

This is the FIFA top ten: Brazil, Italy, Argentina, France, Germany, England, the Netherlands, Portugal, Nigeria, the Czech Republic.

Maybe we should wrestle David Beckham away from Galaxy?

Source: A1+

Armenia Ranks 32nd on Economic Freedom Index

Every year, The Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal publish what is known as "Index of Economic Freedom". What is economic freedom, you ask?

The highest form of economic freedom provides an absolute right of property ownership, fully realized freedoms of movement for labor, capital, and goods, and an absolute absence of coercion or constraint of economic liberty beyond the extent necessary for citizens to protect and maintain liberty itself.

In other words, individuals are free to work, produce, consume, and invest in any way they please, and that freedom is both protected by the state and unconstrained by the state.

This year, Armenia ranked 32nd with 69.4%, which puts us under Moderately Free, but only two spots away from Mostly Free! This ranking also makes Armenia the 19th freest among the 41 countries in the European region, which is pretty amazing! However, we ranked poorly in two of the ten freedoms: Property Rights at 30% and Freedom from Corruption at 29%, but did beautifully in two others: Fiscal Freedom at 93.1% and Freedom from Government at 91.6%.

For comparison, here are how some selected countries ranked:

1st - Hong Kong - 89.3%
4th - United States - 82.0%
6th - United Kingdom - 81.6%
19th - Germany - 73.5%
32nd - Armenia - 69.4%
35th - Georgia - 68.7%
37th - Israel - 68.4%
45th - France - 66.1%
60th - Italy - 63.4%
83rd - Turkey - 59.3%
94th - Greece - 57.6%
107th - Azerbaijan - 55.4%
119th - China - 61.6%
120th - Russia - 61.4%
125th - Ukraine - 60.9%
150th - Iran - 57.5%

Anyway, you can see the full list here: 2007 Index of Economic Freedom