Gigla Mikautadze, the project manager of ReforMeter, was invited to a business forum dubbed “Bond Market in Georgia” organized by TBC Capital on June 15, 2018. One of the major highlights of the forum was a research paper entitled “Bond Market in Georgia”, which concerned the trends and challenges that TBC Capital presented to the forum attendees.

On June 15, 2018, the Farmers’ Congress took place at hotel Betsy’s in Tbilisi. The congress discussed the opportunities and challenges of the EU-Georgia Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area (DCFTA), focusing on small and medium-size farmers and agricultural cooperatives.

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).

BCI in the second quarter of 2018 has improved, reaching 39.6 index points, which is an 8.3 index point gain over the previous quarter. The improvement in Business Confidence is in line with the overall positive country performance (Geostat estimated 5.2% GDP growth in Q1 2018). The BCI increase is based on very high expectations and profitable past performance in almost all business sectors. Compared to other sectors, manufacturing assessed their past performance and expectations the most positively. In contrast, the agriculture sector is the most pessimistic, reflecting a low season in production.

Since 2012, when the political party Georgian Dream took leadership of the country’s governance, economic [real] growth reached its highest rate in 2017 (5.0%). The drivers of this growth were construction (11.2%), hotels and restaurants (11.2%), and the financial sector (9.2%). However, a few sectors of the economy declined in 2017, and one was agriculture (-2.7%).