
On June 27, 2014, Georgia and the EU signed an Association Agreement (AA) and its integral part – the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area (DCFTA). On July 1st, 2016, DCFTA fully entered into force. Until then, trade between Georgia and the EU was regulated by the Special Incentive Arrangement for Sustainable Development and Good Governance that contained a Generalized System of Preferences+ (GSP+) agreed to in 2005.

Geostat has released its GDP growth estimate for the first quarter of 2018. The Q1 growth stands at 5.2%, which is 1.1 percentage points above the recent forecast. ISET-PI’s forecast of real GDP growth for the second quarter of 2018 remains unchanged at 5.9%. The first estimate for the third-quarter growth forecast is at 7.2%.

Based on November 2017 data, the forecast for GDP growth in the fourth quarter of 2017 remained at 4.6%. Real GDP growth rate reached 3.7 % y-o-y in November 2017. As a result, estimated real GDP growth for the first eleven months of 2017 was 4.8%.

On November 22, ISET started a policy seminar series provided by the second-year students of ISET’s MA program. The first presentation was delivered by Tamari Tetvadze & Gunash Kamzaevi, under the supervision of Eric Livny, president of ISET and ISET-PI, and Giorgi Mzhavanadze, Senior Researcher at the Macroeconomic Policy Research Center(MPRC) of ISET-PI.

Recently, Geostat has released the preliminary estimate of the real GDP growth for the third quarter of 2017. The Q3 growth rate now stands at 4.4%, which is 1.5% below ISET-PI’s last forecasted value. As a result, the estimated real GDP growth for the first nine months of 2017 amounted to 4.7%.