The New Year is approaching, and every Georgian family is already preparing for this festive event. And so is the ISET-Policy Institute. We are keeping with our tradition and cooking up a special edition of the Khachapuri Index for our readers: a “New Year’s Supra Index”. This Index shows the cost (in GEL) of a standard supra meal for a family of 5-6 people in each of Georgia’s regions.

On April 3, 2015 the Government of Georgia adopted a technical regulation in the dairy sector in order to define major principles for the production, processing, and distribution of dairy products. Later in 2017, the regulation was amended and the law now strictly regulates the labelling of dairy products and particularly the use of terms such as “cheese” and “butter”.

In December 2018, Georgian power plants generated 986 mln. kWh of electricity. This represents a 9% decrease in total generation, compared to the previous year (in 2017, total generation in December was 1080 mln. kWh. The decrease in generation on a yearly basis comes from decrease in thermal power (-30%), more than offsetting the increase in hydro (+3%) and wind power generation (+11%).

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.

It all started with a simple exercise for my Master’s project in which I tried to understand the underlying causes of the observed wage gap between ethnic Georgians and ethnic minorities in the country. After more than a decade, a reputable international journal has published a paper reporting on the experimental evidence my colleagues and I collected and analyzed on labor market outcomes for ethnic minority and female citizens of Georgia.