With the release of the December data, the year 2014 is now “officially” over. ISET-PI has updated its forecast for Georgia’s real GDP growth rate for the first quarter of 2015; meanwhile, official rapid estimates of both fourth quarter and annual growth rates for 2014 became available from Geostat. Here are the highlights of this month’s releases:

Geostat’s official rapid growth estimate for the last quarter of 2014 is 1.6%, while annual growth stands at 4.7%

ISET-PI’s forecast for the first quarter of 2015 stands at 3.6%, which is just 0.1 points below the previous month’s forecast.

From the beginning of last year, we started drawing conclusions about the annual growth rate for the ongoing year (see our January 2014 and February 2014 publications for a note on methodology). Based on this month’s data, we expect annual growth in 2015 to be 3.2% in the worst-case or “no growth” scenario, and 5.4% in the best-case or “average long-term growth” scenario.