Georgian consumer confidence suffered a major blow at the end of 2014, in the wake of the sharp Lari depreciation. Around February 2015, the Index found some support at the very low level of -35-30 points and has been slightly improving since then. In July 2015, this mildly positive trend was reversed, and in August, the Index dropped another 4.1 points to reach a new historical minimum of -38.4 points. Interestingly, this entire drop was driven by older respondents, those aged over 35. We will come back to this point later in the article.

It is easy to understand what it means for an economy to be weak or strong. We know that a strong economy is characterized by low unemployment and high growth rates. Other desirable traits are, for example, low levels of poverty and income inequality, when all citizens enjoy reasonable standards of living.

According to a recent study, smoking marijuana for many years leads to a severe loss of intelligence: compared with people who did not consume cannabis, the IQ’s of smokers were lower by 13-38 points (Meier et al.: “Persistent cannabis users show neuropsychological decline from childhood to midlife”, PNAS 109, 2012). Moreover, after a long time of consumption, cognitive abilities and memory do not recover when smoking marijuana is eventually given up.

Who should be supervising the activities of commercial banks in Georgia? Currently, this responsibility lies with the country’s National Bank. However, the Georgian parliament will soon be deciding on new legislation, which, if passed, could take away the supervisory role from NBG and transfer it to an independent agency reporting directly to the prime minister.

In the frames of the memorandum of understanding between ISET Policy Institute and the Business Association of Georgia (BAG), ISET-PI offered a compressed four-day training to the staff of the association. Senior researchers of the policy institute, Maya Grigolia, and Nino Doghonadze conducted the training in macroeconomics 101.