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The reality of Azerbaijan is the astronomical income gap between the rich and the poor. In Azerbaijan there are people whose children simply do not know where to spend the money, and in the same time there are people whose children go to sleep hungry, Zaur Nasirli writes in an article published in Azerbaijani portal "Factheber."

As Nariman Agayev, the chairman of the Center for Sustainable Development of Azerbaijan, notes that given the fact that the income of poor people in Azerbaijan does not exceed 2 million manat annually (about 2 thousand euros), the corresponding figures of the rich income are about 50 times bigger. He also believes that the rich in Azerbaijan are getting richer and the poor poorer.

In his turn, Oktay Akhverdiev, an independent Azerbaijani economist, told the newspaper "Echo" in an interview, "Based on our own researches, I can say that there is 22 times gap between the incomes of the 10% richest people in the country and the 10% poorest citizens, while there is 3-4 times gap in America, and 5-6 in Europe."

The article reads that the cost of living in 2013 in Azerbaijan was 93 manats. "I do not know whether to laugh, or to cry. I think that one simply cannot survive on that amount in Baku," the author writes.

Trying to answer the question why Azerbaijan faced such a situation, and how to find a way out of it, the author notes: "In my opinion, there is one reason to all these disasters – monopoly. First, if you eliminate the monopoly, the prices would drop in the country with at least 40%, as a competition in a particular product will appear. The businessmen will try to provide the public cheaper goods with higher quality, in order to sell it. The gap between the rich and the poor will dramatically reduce in a very short time."