Otar Nadaria, the chief economist of TBC Bank, believes that in 2022, Georgia would have high economic growth even without the Russia-Ukraine War. According to Nadaraia, GDP growth should have been around 8%.
"We think that even without the war, there would be at least 8-8.5% economic growth in 2022, although the fact is that, mainly due to the effect of migration, prolonging the war causes additional economic activity in our country. In 2022, we had a very optimistic scenario from the beginning [in terms of economic growth] and it's good that it came true, of course, I don't mean the war part. Georgia really has the effect of migration.
This effect does not only apply to Georgia, and for example, in 2022, even higher growth is expected in Armenia, which is about 13-14%. If we focus on the same tourism, which is the main industry for our economy, there was a very strong recovery before the war. After the war, the recovery of so-called traditional tourism slowed down, but the effect of migration offset this slowdown. For example, we expect to recover 90% of the income from tourism before the war. Accordingly, we almost returned to the level of 2019, although taking into account the migration, the income from tourism exceeded the pre-pandemic level by about 5%", - Nadaraia says.
