On Monday, March 21st, European Commissioner for Trade, Cecilia Malmström visited ISET for a discussion of EU-Georgian economic relations, with an emphasis on DCFTA (Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area). She was accompanied by Janos Herman, Ambassador of the European Union to Georgia, and Natalie Sabanadze, Georgia’s Ambassador to the EU.

We started forecasting the annual growth rate at the start of 2014 (see our January 2014 and February 2014 publications for a note on methodology). Based on this month’s data, we expect annual growth in 2016 to be 2.0% in the worst-case or “no growth” scenario, and 4.5% in the best-case or “average long-term growth” scenario.

According to GeoStat data, real GDP growth was 0.8% in January and 2.8% in February 2016. While these figures are by no means high, growth rates in the rest of the region are expected to be quite low this year. In this respect, in contrast to its neighbors, Georgia is performing reasonably well.

The Quality of Living Survey 2012 of the international consultancy group Mercer ranks 222 cities in the world according to how livable they are. Tbilisi was ranked on Place 213, provoking furious reactions by many Georgians. On the internet, it is easy to find wild slanders against those who created the ranking and even against those who just referred to it, and there was even an online petition initiated against the ranking.

Graph 1 shows the density of Georgian farmers’ revenues received from selling their produce, generated from the sample of 3,000 Georgian rural households. (For the motivation and methodology of our study, please refer to the article that was published here last week. It is also available online on the ISET Economist Blog: “Dumb Farmers Do Not Grow Big Potatoes”, by Florian Biermann and Ruediger Heining).