On April 10, ISET students delivered yet another policy seminar. A presentation entitled “Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) & Economic Growth. Case of Georgia” was delivered by Givi Gujaraidze, Tinatin Mumladze, Kristine Gureshidze, and Shota Bakhuashvili under the supervision of Eric Livny, President of ISET, and Yaroslava Babych, Head of Macroeconomic Policy Research Center at ISET Policy Institute.

Foreign direct investment (FDI) is critical to every developing county, and Georgia is no exception in this regard. Georgia wants to grow out of poverty and catch up with the economically more developed regions of the world – for this to happen, foreign resources are needed, in particular, if the domestic savings rate is as low as in Georgia.

Recently, the Georgian media abounded with alarming reports about a slowdown of foreign direct investments (FDI) in Georgia. Indeed, economic figures seem to support the view that there may be a turn in the FDI activity. The graph shows FDI in the first two quarters of each year from 2005 to 2013.

It is an empirical fact that in market economies the economic activity shows cyclical patterns. The 19th-century French economist Clement Juglar is generally attributed to having formulated the first coherent theory of what are known as business cycles.