On Wednesday, March 27, ISET hosted Dr. Anto Aasa, a Research Fellow in Human Geography from the University of Tartu, who delivered a seminar to ISET’s BA and MA students entitled ‘Use of mobile positioning data in mobility studies’.

There are many mesmerizing buildings in Tbilisi, but do you know which one tourists favor the most? Or have you ever wondered what travelers’ favorite Georgian food or wine is? Thanks to modern tools and data-gathering methods, we now have actual proof that khachapuri is tourists’ all-time favorite Georgian dish. In 2018, the Georgian National Tourism Administration (GNTA), along with Communication Agency Windfor’s, launched a campaign called “Emotions are Georgia” to determine what foreign tourists admire the most in our beautiful country and which emotions they associate with Georgia.

Based on January’s data, we expect annual growth in 2019 to be 4.4% in the worst-case or “no growth” scenario, and 5.5% in the best-case or “average long-term growth” scenario. Our “middle-of-the-road” scenario (based on average growth over the last four quarters) predicts 4.7% real GDP growth.

According to Geostat’s figures, in the third quarter (Q3) of 2018, Georgia’s real GDP experienced growth of 4% year over year (YoY). Despite the slowdown of the growth rate compared to the previous quarters, IMF recently revised their forecast of economic growth for Georgia upwardly, from 4.5% to 5.0%. Forecasts for other international organizations and the National Bank of Georgia (NBG) remained the same, while ISET-PI, based on October’s data, expect annual growth in 2018 to be 4.6% YoY.

A decade after its founding, ISET celebrates its entry among the top 10% economic institutions worldwide doing research on CIS countries. In November 2018 IDEAS ranked ISET the 142nd place out of the 1448 economic institutions in its database doing research on CIS countries. IDEAS is an international database that monitors publications in all fields of economics and ranks economic institutions around the world according to the visibility of their research i.e. how many times their online articles are viewed and downloaded.