ISET kicked off its 2017-2018 school year this Monday, September 4 with an orientation session for incoming students. ISET faculty, staff, and researchers warmly greeted the students and gave them a sense of what they can expect out of their next two years of study. Eric Livny, President of ISET and ISET-PI welcomed new students highlighting critical skills and knowledge they should be striving to acquire.

Between August 29 and September 1, ISET’s Salome Gelashvili attended the XV EAAE Congress “Towards Sustainable Agri-Food Systems: Balancing between Markets and Society” which took place in Parma, Italy.

Georgian Consumer Confidence (CCI) continued to improve in August 2017, gaining almost 5 index points over the previous month (July 2017) and more than 12 points over August 2016. Ignoring the rather wild pre- and post-election swings in the index, the CCI appears to be on a steady upward trend since bottoming out in fall 2015. In August, the CCI climbed to -16.5 points, which is almost 25 index points above its value in September 2015.

Geostat has recently released its rapid estimate of economic growth for the second quarter of 2017, which now stands at 4%. As a result, estimated real GDP growth for the first half of 2017 reached 4.5%. The ISET-PI real GDP growth forecast for the third quarter of 2017 was revised downward to 5.3%.

Since March 2017, the CCI has shown a positive trend. It yielded 9.1 increase from March 2017 (-31) to May 2017 (-21.9), expressing the optimistic perceptions of Georgians during these months. However, the CCI did not maintain this upward trend in June. Overall, in June the CCI went down by 3.2 points compared to May 2017 (from -21.9 to -25.1). Present Situation and Expectations Indices were also affected negatively in June 2017.