In January 2020, the cost of cooking one standard Imeretian khachapuri continued to increase, ranging from 4.21 GEL (Kutaisi) to 4.38 GEL (Batumi), with the average cost being 4.30 GEL. The new average price is 18.3% higher than the price in January 2019. While in month-on-month development, the khachapuri price is 0.7% higher than in December 2019.

High and rising levels of foreign currency indebtedness have been an important topic in Georgia over the past several years. To address this issue and protect borrowers from currency risks, the National Bank of Georgia (NBG), as well as the Georgian Government have implemented regulations to hinder excess indebtedness. Let’s have a look at the timeline (Figure 1) of recent lending regulations and the accompanying monetary policy measures and observe their impact on changing lending patterns in the Georgian economy.

On December 5, the Effective Data Visualization workshop – which was hosted by ISET in collaboration with ForSet and DarkHorse Analytics of Canada – officially came to a close when an award ceremony was held for those participants whose academic performance, significant achievements in data-related economics subjects and outstanding motivation to build future careers in the data-driven economy were of the highest. The winning team received a prize worth 1000 lari.

The Khachapuri Index continued its upward trend in November 2019, with the average cost of cooking one standard Imeretian Khachapuri reaching 4.1 GEL. This is 6.1% higher month-on-month (compared to October 2019), and 12.6% higher year-on-year (compared to November 2018).

At the initiative of the Government of Georgia, a new model of corporate taxation was introduced in 2017. The so-called Estonian Model of Corporate Income Tax (CIT) reform envisaged a transition to a model wherein enterprises would only be taxed on profit distribution.