On November 28-29, Deputy Head of the APRC Salome Gelashvili attended the annual "Dushanbe Economic Meeting 2019" conference in Tajikistan. The conference was organized in the framework of the "Towards Rural Inclusive Growth and Economic Resilience" project (implemented by) GIZ and was devoted to the topic of developing the competitiveness of the agro-industrial complex in Tajikistan.

The Khachapuri Index continued its upward trend in November 2019, with the average cost of cooking one standard Imeretian Khachapuri reaching 4.1 GEL. This is 6.1% higher month-on-month (compared to October 2019), and 12.6% higher year-on-year (compared to November 2018).

In October 2019, Georgian power plants generated 800 mln. kWh of electricity. This represents a 2% increase in total generation, compared to the previous year (in October 2018, the total generation was 783 mln. kWh). The increase in generation on a yearly basis comes from the increase of 8% in thermal and 0.4% in hydropower generation, more than offsetting the decrease in wind power generation (-19%).

According to the preliminary statistics released by GeoStat, Georgia’s real GDP growth constituted 5.7% year over year (y/y) in Q3 2019. As a result, estimated real GDP growth for the first nine months of 2019 amounted to 5.0%, which is above the National Bank of Georgia’s (NBG) growth forecast for 2019 (the forecast remained unchanged at 4.5%). Meanwhile, based on September’s data, ISET-PI expects annual growth in 2019 to be 4.9%.

ISET students visiting Stockholm have returned to Georgia after spending a week in Sweden as guests of the Stockholm School of Economics. While the students attended several lectures at a number of different universities, their time was not limited to studying alongside their Swedish counterparts: instead of a solely academic trip, the students were also taken to visit the Swedish Central Bank and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Sweden, which allowed them to compare the inner workings of one of Europe’s leading economies with their own country.