INSUFFICIENT FUNDING OF ARMENIA’S SCIENCE SPHERE MOST IMPORTANT PROBLEM

Arka News Agency, Armenia
Dec 2 2006

YEREVAN, December 2. /ARKA/. Insufficient funding of Armenia’s science
sphere is the most important problem, President of the Armenian
National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Radik Martirosyan told reporters
Wednesday. He said that in order to better develop science it is
necessary to raise funding for the needs of the sphere," he reported.

Commenting on the idea to reform the science sphere, offered by the
NAS, Martirosyan pointed out that it is in the focus of attention of
scientists and has been discussed at the NAS institutes.

"At today’s discussion, scientists will exchange opinions and
approaches, clarify positive and negative norms, pin down what impact
science will have on economic development. It is necessary to work
out approaches and refute the opinion that there is no progress
currently in the sphere of science. Our science has quite a high
level of development," he said.

At the same time, he added that a number of shortcomings and gaps
exist in this sphere that need to be fixed. It is planned to allocate
AMD 5.5bln for development of science in 2007 against AMD 5.1bln in
2006.