The growth forecast for the 1st quarter of 2014 has been revised downward from 5.6% to 5.3%. The growth forecast for the 2nd quarter of 2014 has been targeted at 5.9%. Meanwhile, Geostat has updated the GDP annual growth estimate of 2013 from 3.1% to 3.2%.

Last week I discussed the economic consequences of inequality. Contrary to a traditional tenet of economics, empirical research has shown that inequality may have adverse economic consequences. Inequality increases the risk of political instability in a country, posing a threat to investments due to the fact that political unrest is highly detrimental to the profits made from any economic activity.

The growth forecast for the 4th quarter of 2013 has been revised downward from 5.2%to 4.9%. The forecast for the first quarter of 2014 has also been reduced from 6.5% to 5.7%. Given the Geostat data for the first three quarters and the ISET-PI forecast for the 4th quarter, the annual growth rate for 2013 is projected to be 2.6%.

One or two years ago, a Lavazza’s take-away coffee shop opened on the side of Georgia’s east-west highway in the area of Zestaponi. You always could find plenty of coffee shops in Tbilisi, but it was a novelty to have them next to the highway. Soon afterward, another coffee bar opened along the road, and surprisingly, it was again set up close to Zestaponi.

In the 1930s, the American linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf put forward the hypothesis that people of different mother tongues perceive the world differently. According to linguistic relativity or Whorfianism, both the grammatical structure and the vocabulary of a language influence the way how people think.