April 1st marks my five year anniversary since I opted to move to this amazing country on the edge where East meets West - Republic of Georgia.
Today, to celebrate this small anniversary I decided to take a look back - to see economic developments in Georgia 2011-2016 - how things how changed since I first landed at Tbilisi airport back at at April 1st, 2011.
See: 3 years in Georgia and 16 places to visit in Georgia and Tbilisi , for my previous annul reviews about Georgia.
As for a small country, pretty much of daily life in Georgia is related to politics. During past five years a major political turnover happened at the end of 2012, when former Presidents Mikheil Saakashvilli party United National Movement lost a majority to rival Georgian Dream coalition, a year latter, when Presidents term of office ended, Misha flew away country (by know Mikheil Saakashvili has been appointed a governor of Odessa oblast in Ukraine).
Very rarely I have found some useful information about country's economic developments, instead there are plenty of politics, public dirty laundry and sometimes some information about tourists visiting Georgia, oh, yes, there are a lot of talks about Lari devaluation. Seems Georgians are not too much worried about actual economic developments. GDP is a term I rarely have ever talked about with anybody here in Georgia. OK, I agree the late comedy shows on Rustavi 2 most probably are lot more interesting than some boring talks about gross domestic product.
I took following data from GeoStat and found following:
| 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | |
| GDP at current prices, mil. USD | 11,636.50 | 14,438.50 | 15,846.80 | 16,139.90 | 16,507.80 | 13,959.90 |
| GDP per capita (at current prices), USD | 2,623 | 3,230.70 | 3,523.40 | 3,599.60 | 3,676.20 | 3,743.10 |
| GDP real growth, percent | 6.2 | 24.07 | 9.75 | 1.84 | 2.27 | -15.43 |
The GDP growth for past five years is rather modest, not to say humble. Well, I arrived here in 2011, when total GDP of Georgia was 14,4 bln USD, in 2015 total economic output of Georgia didn't even reached 14 billion dollars. Yikes. Five years is a lot. I feel pretty shocked of such slow and even negative GDP growth for Georgia. Will Georgia crack 20 billion GDP milestone by the end of this decade? Doable, but for now - I wouldn't be so optimistic.