The GEO real property market grew by 2.4% in Q3 2018, in comparison with Q2 2018. While the annual increase was more pronounced at 24.3% (YoY), in comparison with Q3 2017. Tbilisi dominated the real property market with a 44.4% share in total sales in Q3 2018.

According to Geostat’s figures, in the third quarter (Q3) of 2018, Georgia’s real GDP experienced growth of 4% year over year (YoY). Despite the slowdown of the growth rate compared to the previous quarters, IMF recently revised their forecast of economic growth for Georgia upwardly, from 4.5% to 5.0%. Forecasts for other international organizations and the National Bank of Georgia (NBG) remained the same, while ISET-PI, based on October’s data, expect annual growth in 2018 to be 4.6% YoY.

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.

A decade after its founding, ISET celebrates its entry among the top 10% economic institutions worldwide doing research on CIS countries. In November 2018 IDEAS ranked ISET the 142nd place out of the 1448 economic institutions in its database doing research on CIS countries. IDEAS is an international database that monitors publications in all fields of economics and ranks economic institutions around the world according to the visibility of their research i.e. how many times their online articles are viewed and downloaded.

ISET would like to congratulate resident faculty members Muhammad Asali, Norberto Pignatti, and Sophiko Skhirtladze on the publication of their new article, entitled “Employment discrimination in the former Soviet Union Republic: Evidence from a field experiment” and published in the Journal of Comparative Economics.