On May 25-27, the FREE Network Retreat was held in Minsk, Belarus. The Forum for Research on Eastern Europe and Emerging Economies (FREE) is a joint initiative of SITE (Stockholm), BEROC (Minsk), BICEPS (Riga), CEFIR (Moscow), KSE (Kyiv), and ISET (Tbilisi). All members meet annually and share their experiences.

On May 22, ISET hosted a panel discussion on the importance of properly defining problems, a measure that serves as the first step of impact assessment and existing practices in Georgia. This was the first meeting of a series of RIA evening talks organized in the scope of an EU-funded project, “Legislative Impact Assessment, Drafting, and Representation”.

March 2018 extends a long period of “business-as-usual” for Georgian consumers. The overall CCI improved by only 1.6 index points (from -19.1 to -17.5), remaining within the narrow band of [-21, -16] in which it has hovered since July 2017. All the improvement in March is due to the 5.3 index points increase in the Present Situation Index (up from -27.4 to -22.2). Expectations have actually declined by 2 index points (down from -10.8 to -12.8).

Geostat has released its GDP growth estimate for the first quarter of 2018. The Q1 growth stands at 5.2 percent, which is 1.1 percentage points above the recent ISET-PI forecast. ISET-PI’s forecast of real GDP growth for the second quarter of 2018 stands at 5.9 percent - up from 5.1 percent in April.

From May 14-18, Pati Mamardashvili visited the Geisenheim University in Germany to attend seminars and give lectures to students. Pati’s visit was aimed at reinforcing cooperation between ISET’s Agricultural Economics Concentration and Geisenheim University.