BAKU, Azerbaijan (AP) – Azerbaijan’s economy will maintain last year’s 35-percent growth rate in 2007, driven by the ex-Soviet nation’s oil boom, the president said Tuesday.
Oil revenues had allowed the government to create 520,000 new jobs in the nation of 8 million over the last three years and reduce poverty, Ilham Aliev said.
“Oil riches have been justly divided between the nation’s citizens,” he said at an economic conference. “Our oil strategy has been successful because all people have received dividends.”
Azerbaijan’s political opposition has accused Aliev’s government of failing to justly distribute the nation’s oil wealth and solve the problem of poverty. Aliev succeeded his father, Geidar, a former KGB general who had been in power for a decade, in a 2003 election that was criticized by foreign observers and dismissed as fraudulent by the opposition.
Aliev said the country’s economy grew by 26 percent in 2005, by 35 percent last year and is expected to maintain last year’s growth rate this year.
The quick growth has allowed increased budget spending which is set to reach the equivalent of $6.5 billion this year compared to $1.4 billion in 2003, Aliev said.
The United States backed a 1,760-kilometer (1,100-mile) pipeline delivering oil from offshore oil fields in Azerbaijan to Turkey’s Mediterranean port of Ceyhan for export to the West, bypassing Russia and Iran.
A gas line is in the works, and Georgia, Turkey and Azerbaijan also signed a deal earlier this month to build a railroad line that will provide a new route for trade between the three nations.
Aliev hailed the new railroad link, saying it will strengthen Azerbaijan’s role as a transit nation.
