YEREVAN, March 15. /ARKA/. Armenia should work out its own rating methodology, which will serve as basis for assessing risks, Tatul Manaseryan, an economist and the head of the Alternative think tank, said Friday at a news conference.

“I find it wrong to downplay significance of ratings,” he said answering ARKA News Agency’s question. “We should be realistic and shouldn’t distance ourselves from what the global economy reckons with.”

Manaseryan said that today Armenia’s risk assessments are grounded on rating organizations’ opinions which are sometimes based on quite unreliable sources.

“It is very important to have own assessments based on own data and to have own opinion instead of pinning faith on international agencies,” he said. “We should think over an alternative rating methodology, and we are working on the matter.”

Earlier, Sergey Glazyev, adviser to the Russian president and a member of the National Banking Council, said at a news conference in Russia that Russia’s financial authorities should stop basing their risk assessments on international agencies’ ratings.

He said international rating agencies, inflating the United States’ ratings and downgrading developing economies’ ratings, have completely discredited themselves amid the global economic recession. ---0---