Tag Archives: economy

Georgia’s GDP deflator increasing

JUNE 19 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Georgia’s GDP deflator outstripped its nominal GDP growth for the second consecutive quarter, official data showed, highlighting the stagnating economy. Georgia’s GDP deflator measured 5.1% in Q1, compared to GDP growth of 3.1% nominal GDP growth. The GDP deflator is an important measure of real GDP growth. The GDP deflator last outstripped nominal GDP growth in 2011.

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(News report from Issue No. 237, published on June 25 2015)

Georgian government cuts national budget

JUNE 23 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – TBILISI – Georgia’s finance ministry said it will cut the national budget by 140m lari ($53m), 1.75% of the original budget, because of an economic slowdown.

Cuts will be made across government but hardest hit will be education, agriculture and the interior ministry.

PM Irakli Garibashvili said the government should have revised its budget earlier.

“Almost all the countries in the region had to revise their budgets because of the crisis,” he told parliament.

The government said that Georgia’s economy would grow by around 2% this year, far below the 5% initially anticipated.

A downturn in Russia’s economy and a slump in energy prices has hit Georgia hard. It is unclear if these cuts will be enough or more will follow.

The popularity of the ruling Georgian Dream has been slip- ping, in part because of the economic slowdown.

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(News report from Issue No. 237, published on June 25 2015)

Kazakhstan increased gold reserves

JUNE 25 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kazakhstan increased its gold reserves for the 32nd month in a row, the IMF said. Kazakhstan’s gold reserves measure 203.4 tonnes. Despite spending heavily to protect the tenge, the Kazakh Central Bank has maintained its policy of buying gold.

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(News report from Issue No. 237, published on June 25 2015)

MoneyGram to operate in Turkmenistan

JUNE 23 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – MoneyGram International, a money wire transfer service, said that it had set up operations in Turkmenistan. MoneyGram’s entry into Turkmenistan will be boost to remittance flows which rely heavily on easy wire transfer services.

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(News report from Issue No. 237, published on June 25 2015)

Azerbaijani weapons exports increases

JULY 22 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Yaver Jamalov, Azerbaijan’s defence industry minister, said he wanted to increase the number of countries that Azerbaijan exported its weapons and ammunition to. Mr Jamalov said he had concluded a deal with Iraq’s government to supply hundreds of grenade launchers and mortars.

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(News report from Issue No. 241, published on July 23 2015)

Kazakh car manufacturers report production rise

JUNE 16 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kazakh carmakers doubled domestic production in May compared to April, according to the Association of the Kazakh Automobile Business, but overall sales are still lower this year.

Car production and demand are a decent weathermast for checking the health of economies. Kazakhstan, like the rest of the region, has been struggling to cope with the fallout from a decline in economic conditions, linked mainly to a fall in global oil prices.

This drop in car sales and production numbers.

Overall, car sales have slumped by around a third in Kazakhstan in the first quarter of the year compared to 2014 but there was a definite uptick in domestic production last month. Domestic manufacturers produced 2,611 new cars in May up from t 1,248 cars in April.

The car market is still suffering from slow sales in the first quarter of 2015, down 32% from the last quarter of 2014.

Car manufacturing has become increasingly important to Kazakhstan’s economy, employing hundreds of people. Most of the industry is based around Kostanai in the north of the country and Oskemen, or Ust-Kamenogorsk as it was called until recently, in the east.

In Kazakhstan, car sales hit 160,000 in 2013, up nearly 70% from 2012. There was a slight drop in 2014 and 2015 is shaping up to be an even bigger drop. This will likely be the first time that car sales have declined for two years in a row in Kazakhstan since 2008 and 2009, during the global economic crisis.

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(News report from Issue No. 236, published on June 18 2015)

Inflation worries Georgia’s Central Bank

JUNE 15 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Prices manufacturers in Georgia are paying to produce their goods are rising at the fastest rate since 2011, the national statistics agency said, sparking concern that underlying inflation may also be accelerating.

Georgia’s Central Bank has said it wants to fight off the effects of regional economic turmoil and the falling value of its lari currency and keep inflation under control.

But Geostat, the Georgian statistics agency, said its Producer Price Index (PPI) rose by 0.8% in May from April, registering an increase of 9% from May 2014.

“Manufacturing prices increased 11.1% contributing 9.05 percentage points to the overall index growth,” Geostat said of the PPI growth rate figures.

“The prices mainly increased for manufacture of food products, beverages and tobacco products (16.9%), manufacture of paper and publishing (30.4%) and manufacture of basic metals and fabricated metal products (4.0%).”

The 9% year-on-year increase in May was the highest inflation in prices paid by producers since 2011 when the economies were recovering from the 2008/9 global financial crisis and price inflation was a major concern. Now inflation, triggered by a falling lari, is once again a headache that the Central Bank has to confront.

The lari has lost around 20% of its value this year. The Georgian Central Bank has been putting up interest rates to try to strengthen its currency and dampen inflationary pressures.

Geostat’s Consumer Price Index measured a jump in inflation of 0.6% in May, measuring a rise to 3.5% of year-on-year inflation, its highest since September 2014.

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(News report from Issue No. 236, published on June 18 2015)

Kyrgyzstan to face inflation

JUNE 14 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kyrgyzstan will only see the benefits of its membership of the Kremlin-led Eurasian Economic Union in 2017, media quoted economy minister Oleg Pankratov as saying. He said inflation will initially soar in Kyrgyzstan once it joins the economic group.

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(News report from Issue No. 236, published on June 18 2015)

Uzbekistan-Russia trade drops

JUNE 13 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Trade between Russia and Uzbekistan has dropped slightly last year because of the worsening economic conditions, Vladimir Tyurdenev, the Russian ambassador in Tashkent, told media. Mr Tyurdenev’s comments are a rare admission by an official that the downturn in Russia’s economy has hit Uzbekistan.

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(News report from Issue No. 236, published on June 18 2015)

Azerbaijani gas exports rise

JUNE 17 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Azerbaijan exported 4.1% more gas in the first five months of the year compared to the same period last year, media quoted the country’s statistics agency as saying. Azerbaijan wants to expand gas exports.

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(News report from Issue No. 236, published on June 18 2015)