“Armenian Socio-Demographic Initiative” NGO, jointly with Yerevan State Institute of Economics, and with financial and organizational support of Committee of Science of RA, Central Bank of Armenia, UNFPA representative in Armenia, and CRRC-Armenia organized an international conference under the title of “The Social and Demographic Costs of Transition” (Karapetyan Readings) on October 1-3, 2008 in Aghveran, Armenia. 

The conference was dedicated to the memory of professor Armen Karapetyan, who have established and developed the school of statistics, demography, sociology, mathematical methods in economic research and had a considerable contribution in the development of a computation technology in Armenia. 

The goal of the three-day conference was to discuss and to assess the social-economic and demographic consequences of transition to market economy, the qualitative and quantitative pecularities of those consequences in separate countries as well as tools of mitigation and liquidation of negative social-demographics consequences.

The conferences gathered 47 participants from Armenia, Russia, Germany, France and the USA. Active debate was held during the session on migration, moderated by the Chief of Migration Agency Gagik Yeganyan. 

While  Mr. Yeganyan was presenting the efforts of the agencies, towards the return of the migrants to Armenia,  YSU lecturer, Professor Ludmila Harutyunyan was supporting her position that the state agencies consider labor migration “an economic branch that does not require financial investments,” and the return of the migrants is not at all desired. During the wrap-up session policy recommendations have been developed to present to interested parties dealing with the issue of migration, poverty reduction, and demographics.