On February 26, under the USAID-funded Good Governance Initiative (GGI) in Georgia, we, as a subcontractor to Tetra Tech ARD, introduced our initiated monitoring and evaluation tool to members of the Healthcare and Social Issues Committee of the Parliament of Georgia, enabling them to carry out comprehensive quality monitoring and evaluation of the State Program on Universal Healthcare on an unprecedented scale.

With the purpose of enhancing good governance and sustainable development in the municipalities of Georgia, on February 1-5, together with the National Association of Local Authorities of Georgia (NALAG), we conducted an online training course for 168 representatives from all municipalities of Georgia, in order to introduce the concept of the Performance Monitoring and Evaluation System (PMES) as well as the application of the corresponding informational platform software, ensuring better measurement of the municipalities’ effectiveness, under the EU-funded project entitled “Networking for Efficiency and Development (N4ED).”

We recently started a new project, the goal of which is to advance e-work market development in Georgia by assessing the e-work market demand among enterprises from the five biggest cities of Georgia, and helping to match this demand with the rural labor force of the selected municipalities under the EU-funded program “Improving Rural Development in Georgia (IRDG),” which is being implemented by UNDP.

The International Consortium on Governmental Financial Management (ICGFM), a leading global public financial management (PFM) organization uniting government entities, institutions, professional associations, university departments and high-level financial management professionals devoted to improving financial management, has organized a virtual training symposium entitled “Managing Through Crisis: COVID-19 and Governance,” which will take place on February 9-10. As part of the symposium, Mr. Aleksi Aleksishvili, CEO and Chairman at PMCG, will moderate the panel entitled “Budgeting in Uncertain Times,” which will bring together panelists from North America, Africa, the Caucasus, and the Balkans.

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic heavily disrupted the world, causing both a global health emergency and a global economic crisis. While almost every country and every sector have been affected, economies reliant on the service sector, and especially the tourism industry, such as Georgia, have suffered notably. Indeed, measures taken to contain the spread of the virus have had an especially negative impact on the economy. Preliminary estimates suggest a decline in Georgia’s real GDP in 2020 of 6.1%, the sharpest drop since 1994.In this issue, we provide forecasts for the performance of the Georgian economy for 2021, namely regarding its real GDP growth rate, sector-specific growth rates, and employment.

The number of international travelers declined by 94.5% in January compared to the same period of 2020, while the number of international visitors fell by 93.6% and the number of international tourists fell by 91.9%; In January 2021, the year over year Hotel Price Index decreased by 33.8% in Adjara and by 28.5% in Samtskhe-Javakheti; The number of ski-lift users in Georgia grew significantly, by an annual average rate of 21%, from the 2014-2015 season up to and including the 2018-2019 season. However, compared to the 2018-19 season, the number of ski-lift users dropped by 20% during the 2019-2020 season, due to the looming COVID-19 pandemic which effectively brought the season to an early finish. Thereafter, the 2020-2021 season has been cancelled outright due to the ongoing epidemiological crisis; Sales per skiing day demonstrated significant growth from the 2014-2015 winter season up to and including the 2018-2019 winter season, growing by 33% annually on average in this period. It even registered modest growth (4%) in the 2019-2020 season.

In Georgia, the average cost of a room in a 3-star hotel was 118 GEL per night in January 2021, while the average cost of a room in a 4-star hotel in Georgia was 188 GEL per night and the average cost of a room in a guesthouse was 72 GEL per night.

In this issue, we overview trends in Ukraine’s labor market indicators through the past decade and compare the dynamics of unemployment rates of Eastern Partnership countries over the same period. In addition, we analyze the effects of COVID-19 on the key labor market indicators, as well as on average wages and number of vacancies posted in 2020.

In Georgia, the average cost of a room in a 3-star hotel was 123 GEL per night in December 2020, while the average cost of a room in a 4-star hotel in Georgia was 197 GEL per night and the average cost of a room in a guesthouse was 70 GEL per night.

Tourism across the world in 2020 was decimated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Since March 2020, the industry has been all but sidelined by various lockdowns including severe restrictions to international travel. To counter these difficulties, businesses in tourism-related industries were provided different support measures throughout 2020, and many of these have been extended into 2021; The number of international travelers declined by 92.4% in December compared to the same period of 2019, while the number of international visitors fell by 90.8% and the number of international tourists fell by 86.3%; The price changes in Adjara and Guria are the most representative of tourism’s decline. In December 2020, the year over year Hotel Price Index decreased by 41% in Guria, by 39% in Adjara and by 31.3% in Samtskhe-Javakheti.

International rankings and indicators help us to understand and assess how countries are performing in different areas. In this bulletin, Georgia’s positions in international rankings and their dynamics are reviewed based on recent data, and these are also compared to other Eastern Partnership (EaP) countries (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Moldova, Ukraine, and Belarus).

The spread of COVID-19 has resulted in a global pandemic, followed by an abrupt economic crisis due to the necessary measures taken to reduce infection and death rates. In this bulletin, we focus on the countries of the Black Sea region, specifically their preparedness for an economic crisis and their actual economic performance during the pandemic, before presenting forecasts for 2021.

In Q1-Q3 of 2020, total trade turnover in Ukraine amounted to 72.8 bln USD, which is a 6.9 bln (9%) decrease, compared to the corresponding period of 2019; In Q1-Q3 of 2020, Ukrainian exports decreased by 6% compared to the corresponding period of 2019, while Ukrainian imports dropped by 11%; In Q1-Q3 of 2020, Ukraine’s trade deficit amounted to 2.98 bln USD, which is 2.6 bln USD (47%) decrease compared to the corresponding period of 2019; In Q1-Q3 of 2020, the main export partners were China, Poland and Russia, with shares in total export volume of 13.8%, 6.7% and 5.8% respectively. The main import partners were China (15.3% of total imports), Germany (10.2%) and Russia (8.8%).