From the clay tablets of Hammurabi to the credit scores of today, humanity has always paid a price for not understanding money. In this op-ed, Vache Gabrielyan traces how Armenia is closing that gap, what the latest data reveals about who still gets left behind, and why financial literacy is less a destination than a lifelong journey.
Text : Vache Gabrielyan Photo : AUA
Humanity has worried about financial literacy for as long as there has been money to manage. The Code of Hammurabi (c. 1750 BC) treated finance as one of the central concerns of its legal system—it capped interest at 20% on silver and 33¹/³% on grain (with the entire loan forfeited if you charged more), forgave a year’s debt and interest if a flood or drought wiped out a farmer’s crop, capped debt-slavery at three years, and required sealed tablets and witnesses for any transfer of silver or deposit of goods.
The consequences of financial illiteracy back then were brutal and immediate. A farmer who didn’t grasp the difference between a silver loan and a grain loan, or who put his seal on a tablet he couldn’t read, could find his wife and children working in the creditor’s household by the next harvest. A merchant who failed to demand a sealed receipt had no claim if his agent simply denied receiving the goods. The whole system assumed that ordinary people would, when necessary, read the laws and verify the terms—and those who didn’t paid for that gap with their land, their labor, and sometimes their families.
The modern world looks very different from Hammurabi’s, but financial literacy has only grown in importance when it comes to ordinary people.
Armenia started to systematically address the issue in 2012, after a World Bank survey showed most Armenians scored poorly on basic financial concepts. The Central Bank initiated a national committee in response, and by 2014 Armenia had its first National Financial Education Strategy.
The strategy rolled out in phases. The first, from 2014 to 2019, built financial topics into four school subjects. By the end of 2019 it had reached 685 schools, around 220,000 students, and nearly 5,000 teachers.
The second phase, 2021 to 2025, pushed the school program toward full national coverage and broadened its reach to women, families, migrants, and rural communities.
The Central Bank’s third national survey, released in December 2025, put Armenia’s Financial Capability Index at 56.5%—above both the 50% target for 2025 and the 55% benchmark set for 2031. Some gaps remained, the Central Bank noted—debt behavior (the majority had loans and nearly one in five borrowers was behind on payments) and overconfidence about fraud (people were often doing the right things, but more by copying others than by drawing on real knowledge).
AUA Course Bridging the Knowledge Gap for Every Major
The American University of Armenia (AUA) has been working to bridge this gap for years—not only through specialized courses for business majors, but also a general education offering titled Introduction to Personal Finance, a course open to students of every major.
The content is practical and built around Armenian reality. Students learn how money originates and moves through the country’s financial system, and how the everyday products that sit on top of it—savings and current accounts, loans, credit and debit cards, insurance, basic investments—actually work. The course also walks through the major principles behind different types of interest calculations and what it takes to build and keep a good credit score, the kind of thing that shapes your life for decades but rarely gets taught.
Armenia’s credit culture is still maturing, and many people don’t realize how much their borrowing history will shape their options later. A course like this one builds the kind of real understanding the CBA survey suggests is missing—the conceptual grasp behind the behavior.
AUA CBRD Study
A different angle on the same question comes from AUA’s Center for Business Research and Development. In 2025, the CBRD adapted the U.S. Financial Industry Regulatory Authority’s financial literacy survey, ran it across Armenian regions, and compared the results with FINRA’s national study in the United States.
The findings are very interesting. Despite the U.S. having roughly ten times Armenia’s GDP per capita, the average financial literacy pass rates are nearly identical—28.10% in the U.S. versus 27.00% in Armenia. National wealth, it turns out, isn’t the sole driver of financial knowledge.
What drives it differs sharply between the two countries. In the U.S., income predicts almost everything about regional performance, and urbanization barely matters. Rural Vermont and Wyoming actually outperform highly urbanized Florida and Nevada.
Armenia tells a different story. Both wages and urbanization matter, and they matter a lot. Yerevan, fully urban, scores 35.31%—better than the top U.S. state. Rural Gegharqunik scores 17.97%, on par with the lowest performers in the American South.
Maybe this isn’t really about culture. It’s about infrastructure, both soft and hard. Banks, schools, and stable internet reach almost every corner of the U.S., so it doesn’t matter much where you live. In Armenia, those resources are concentrated in the capital, and the gap shows up in every financial literacy measure.
One bright spot is worth mentioning. Armenians actually outscore Americans on understanding inflation—63.21% versus 59.50%.
The CBRD study and CBA survey approach the question differently, but they point the same way. Income and geography heavily shape what Armenians know about money.
Financial Education as a Lifelong Journey
Financial education can’t be a one-time event. People’s brains, life situations, and financial decisions all change with age, and the teaching has to keep up.
A 2025 study in Nature Communications mapped how brain networks reorganize across the human lifespan and found four major turning points—around ages 9, 32, 66, and 83. Each one marks a shift in how we process and integrate information. Cognitive efficiency peaks in the late twenties, then gradually gives way to different patterns of thinking.
The implications for financial education are direct. Childhood is the time to plant foundational ideas about money—exactly where Armenia’s school curriculum is already focused, thanks to that first National Financial Education Strategy. Young adulthood is when the bigger decisions start landing—first jobs, eventually mortgages—and that’s where the learning from a course like AUA’s Introduction to Personal Finance fits.
Middle age brings the highest financial stakes—dependent children, aging parents, retirement planning—and people need ongoing reinforcement, not a refresher of what they learned at twenty. Late life, when fraud risk rises and cognitive flexibility narrows, calls for simpler, protective guidance tailored to that stage.
The CBRD findings make all of this concrete. The lowest scores cluster in low-wage rural regions, and often this is shaped by many years of limited access to financial education, infrastructure, and opportunity. The CBA behavioral data fills in the rest of the picture—even people who know the right answers often act on instinct rather than understanding.
Armenia has come a long way since 2014. The CBA 56.5% capability index and AUA’s research and teaching all point to real progress. But the deeper lesson here is that financial literacy is not a destination. It’s a lifelong practice, and education has to meet people wherever they are along the way.