Georgia’s food & agricultural exports almost hit their 1 billion USD threshold, attaining a historic maximum since independence – and that certainly sounds like something to celebrate! However, the respective imports have also increased and broken records. As a result, the trade balance (the difference between export and import) remained virtually unchanged at (-394) million USD.

On April 3, 2015 the Government of Georgia adopted a technical regulation in the dairy sector in order to define major principles for the production, processing, and distribution of dairy products. Later in 2017, the regulation was amended and the law now strictly regulates the labelling of dairy products and particularly the use of terms such as “cheese” and “butter”.

On December 17, Salome Gelashvili, the Deputy Head of the APRC, presented a policy paper entitled “Challenges of Executing Technical Regulation of Dairy Products” to representatives of the dairy sector. The meeting was organized in the framework of the Supporting Food and Agriculture Business Support Organizations in DCFTA and SME Policy Implementation project.

Geostat recently updated its preliminary estimate of real GDP growth for the first and second quarters of 2018. The Q1 and Q2 GDP growth estimates were revised downward to 5.2% and 5.6%, respectively. The third quarter estimates so far remained unchanged.

BCI in the fourth quarter of 2018 has worsened, dropping to 29.9 index points, which is a 5.5 index point loss over the previous quarter. The BCI drop is based on the worsening of past performance and expectations in many business sectors. Compared to other sectors, manufacturing and agriculture assessed their past performance and expectations the most pessimistically. In contrast, the retail trade sector is the most positive.