Abel Aganbegyan

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Abel Aganbegyan (Russian: Абе́л Гезе́вич Аганбегя́н) is a Russian economist of Armenian descent.

He was born on October 8, 1932 in Tiflis, Soviet Union (now Tbilisi, Georgia). He was one of Mikhail Gorbachev's chief economic advisers and among the first Soviet economists to voice the need for a restructuring of the economic and business infrastructure of the Soviet Union.

He was the rector of the Academy of the National Economy in Moscow and the director of the Novosibirsk Institute of Economics. He highlighted some of the economic problems the USSR faced, attributing the poor performance of the Soviet economy that became evident during the Brezhnev years to the enormous commitment of resources to defense and to the "extreme centralism" of the economy.