April 2016 GDP Forecast | Lari interest rates climb, as banks try to attract long-term savings in national currency
20
April
2016
ISET-PI has updated its forecast for Georgia’s real GDP growth rate for the first two quarters of 2016. Here are the highlights of this month’s releases:
- ISET-PI’s forecast for the first two quarters of 2016 remains at 2.9% and 5.0% respectively.
- We started forecasting the annual growth rate at the beginning of 2014 (see our January 2014 and February 2014 publications for a note on methodology). Based on this month’s data, we expect annual growth in 2016 to be 2.0% in the worst-case or “no growth” scenario, and 4.5% in the best-case or “average long-term growth” scenario. Our “middle-of-the-road” scenario (based on average growth in the last four quarters) predicts a 3.3% real GDP increase in 2016. This is just 0.3 percentage points above the recently released annual economic growth projection of 3% from the National Bank of Georgia.