Based on the data from August, the fifth update of the Q3 growth forecast was yet again revised downward from 3.7% to 2.2%. The second update of the growth forecast for the last quarter of 2014 was also revised from 1.7% down to 0.4%.

Based on July data we made the 4th update of the Q3 forecast, and it was revised down from -7.6%, down to 3.7%. We also begin to forecast the last quarter of 2014, the forecast is not promising, it is just 1.7%.

After a dip in April, the GDP growth rate seems to be back on track, the year-on-year growth rate in July was 7.2%. Higher rates of electricity consumption and an increase in the change of VAT payers’ turnover corroborate this evidence. In July electricity consumption and VAT payers’ turnover were 3.8 and 15.4 percent higher compared to the same month in the previous year.

The purpose of this event was to have a discussion about the potential of the tourism sector to improve well-being and reduce poverty in rural areas of Georgia, as well to discuss the contribution the development of large hotels in peripheral touristic destinations can make to inclusive growth in local communities. The follow up activity of this dialogue was an excursion to the Kazbegi Municipality on July 19.

In the first part of this article, I described some of the adverse incentives resulting from a social welfare system. Then I argued that according to Simon Kuznets' famous paradigm, increasing inequality is hardly evitable when a country enters a growth trajectory (as Georgia did in 2003), and I reasoned that it is at least an ambivalent (not to say questionable) policy for Georgia, at its current state of development, to fight inequality by social welfare measures. In this vein, the article seemed to advocate that Georgia might better follow the “Asian” approach of “develop first, redistribute later”.