01
September
2017
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.
31
August
2017
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.
21
August
2017
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%.
28
June
2017
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.
24
June
2017
After the Rose Revolution, in the name of of economic growth, the Georgian government set aside environmental issues and focused on a quick economic recovery. This is understandable, as the Georgian economy was still recovering from the collapse of the early 90’s, and the pressure to accelerate the process was high. At that time, the existing environmental regulations were perceived as an additional constraint to faster growth, and as potentially fertile ground for corruption.
