“You need to think carefully before you jump into this deep sea,” said Professor Daniel Levy at the very beginning of a presentation entitled “Ph.D. Studies – Who Is It For?”. While this statement sounded frightening to those who were planning to pursue a Ph.D. or other further studies, it appeared to be more bemusing for others who were not considering a career in academia.

The average cost of cooking one standard Imeretian khachapuri in the first month of this year is 3.62 GEL, which is 3.2% lower – m onth-on-month (compared to the previous month), and 2.5% lower year-on-year (from January 2018).

BCI in the first quarter of 2019 has worsened, dropping to 22.6 index points, which is a 7.4 index point loss over the previous quarter. The BCI drop is driven by worsening in the past performance and expectations in a number of the business sectors. Interestingly, companies in the construction industry assessed their past performance most pessimistically, however they display the most optimistic expectations. While the private sector expectations tend to worsen, they continue to remain positive.

Looking at annual consumption and generation trends, from 2012-2016, it is clear that generation typically exceeded consumption. Consequently, the generation-consumption gap remained positive. However, in 2017 this trend reverted, and the electricity generated by local resources on the Georgian market was no longer enough to supply the local demand. As shown in Figure 1, the gap widened even further in 2018; with the negative gap increasing by 30% (from 344 mln. kWh in 2017 to 447 mln. kWh in 2018).

In January 2019, Georgian power plants generated 1011 mln. kWh of electricity (Figure 1). This represents a 0.3% decrease in total generation, compared to the previous year (in 2018, total generation in January was 1014 mln. kWh.) The decrease in generation on a yearly basis comes from decrease in hydro and wind power generation (-11% and -18%), more than offsetting the increase in thermal power generation (+22%).