The Institute of Social and Economic Studies of Population RAS, Moscow, Russia¹ ; M. Kotanyan Institute of Economics, National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia²:

Dokholyan S. V.^1,2, Professor, Doctor of Economic Sciences, sergsvd@mail.ru

M. Kotanyan Institute of Economics, National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia:
Makaryan A. R., Candidate of Economic Sciences

Armenian State University of Economics, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia:
Hayrapetyan A. A., Candidate of Economic Sciences
Mkrtchyan H. G., Post-Graduate Student

The government of Armenia introduced two major legislative changes in the period 2021–2022: state duties on exports then replacing thereof with a new royalty assessment method to levy additional taxes (including payments) and increase taxes paid by the mines-to-government tax revenue ratio. Therefore, we estimated the impact of real exports (as the only and/or major source of revenue) of copper and other metallic concentrates on the real taxes paid by the largest Armenian taxpayers in the short-run using quarterly data (2013q1–2021q2) and Least Squares (NLS and ARMA) estimation method, to determine how changes in mining fiscal regime had already affected and would affect the taxes to be paid by the mines from 2023 onward, and new investors’ attraction process. We find that an increase in the real exports of metallic concentrates lagged 1 period could cause a decline in the real taxes paid by major metallic concentrates' exporters. We conclude that the proposed changes had already and would negatively affect companies, thus leading to much higher royalty-to-taxes paid by a company ratio exceeding 70% (on average) if prices hike, and this, in its turn, could negatively affect the decision of investors to invest in Armenia.

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