On December 5, the Effective Data Visualization workshop – which was hosted by ISET in collaboration with ForSet and DarkHorse Analytics of Canada – officially came to a close when an award ceremony was held for those participants whose academic performance, significant achievements in data-related economics subjects and outstanding motivation to build future careers in the data-driven economy were of the highest. The winning team received a prize worth 1000 lari.

According to the preliminary statistics released by GeoStat, Georgia’s real GDP growth constituted 5.7% year over year (y/y) in Q3 2019. As a result, estimated real GDP growth for the first nine months of 2019 amounted to 5.0%, which is above the National Bank of Georgia’s (NBG) growth forecast for 2019 (the forecast remained unchanged at 4.5%). Meanwhile, based on September’s data, ISET-PI expects annual growth in 2019 to be 4.9%.

On the 13th of November, ISET was visited by Joey Cherdarchuk of Darkhorse Analytics, a Canadian company specializing in data science and information design. The firm is dedicated to helping organizations and individuals present their data in a clear and understandable way; in an often humorous and highly informative workshop, Mr. Cherdarchuk demonstrated how failures in data presentation can be misleading (wilfully or otherwise) and inaccurate.

After facing a generation deficit during the month of August, Georgia continued to experience a decrease in power generation. In September 2019, generation decreased by 3% compared to September 2018 and by 19% compared to August 2019.

ISET-PI’s forecast of real GDP growth for the third quarter (July-September) of 2019 remains at 7.1%, unchanged from last month’s prediction. While the third estimate for the fourth quarter (October-December) growth forecast stands at 5.5%. Geostat recently published its preliminary estimate of real GDP growth for August, which currently stands at 5.8%. As a result, the real GDP growth estimate for the first eight months of 2019 was reduced to 5%.