On May 25-27, the FREE Network Retreat was held in Minsk, Belarus. The Forum for Research on Eastern Europe and Emerging Economies (FREE) is a joint initiative of SITE (Stockholm), BEROC (Minsk), BICEPS (Riga), CEFIR (Moscow), KSE (Kyiv), and ISET (Tbilisi). All members meet annually and share their experiences.

March 2018 extends a long period of “business-as-usual” for Georgian consumers. The overall CCI improved by only 1.6 index points (from -19.1 to -17.5), remaining within the narrow band of [-21, -16] in which it has hovered since July 2017. All the improvement in March is due to the 5.3 index points increase in the Present Situation Index (up from -27.4 to -22.2). Expectations have actually declined by 2 index points (down from -10.8 to -12.8).

Geostat has released its GDP growth estimate for the first quarter of 2018. The Q1 growth stands at 5.2 percent, which is 1.1 percentage points above the recent ISET-PI forecast. ISET-PI’s forecast of real GDP growth for the second quarter of 2018 stands at 5.9 percent - up from 5.1 percent in April.

Georgian consumer sentiment remained practically unchanged in February 2018, extending a fairly long trend of stability (or stagnation) that goes back to at least August 2017. The CCI lost a tiny 0.2 index points, declining from -18.9 in January to -19.1 index points in February 2018. CCI’s two sub-indices, capturing consumer expectations and present situation assessment, moved in the opposite directions. The Present Situation Index lost 3.8 (declining from -23.6 to -27.4 index points).

The Khachapuri Index kept declining in April, 2018, very much in line with the seasonal trend we observe every year. The average cost of cooking one standard Imeretian khachapuri currently stands at 3.28 GEL, which is 7.4% lower month-on-month (that is, compared to March 2018), and 1% lower year-on-year (that is, compared to April 2017).