As European leaders pledged an aid package to save Georgia’s war-battered economy, some analysts said the war may have partly shielded this Caucasus mountain nation from the worst of the global financial downturn.
While the crisis has buffeted many smaller countries and emerging markets, Georgia may have had at least some good luck — by being among the first in what is now a long line of countries waiting for bailouts from international organizations.
“In some ways, this crisis that happened in August was a little bit ahead of the curve of the bad news,” said Thomas Lubeck, senior investment officer at the International Finance Corporation. “In some ways, it’s kind of a blessing in disguise.”
Analysts say Georgia might have faced a sharp economic slowdown from the global financial crisis anyway. But because of the timing of the August war, the influx of donor cash could keep the economy here afloat, at least in the short term.
“It’s a hard way to luck out, I guess, but there is a silver lining to the cloud,” Lubeck said.
The destruction of infrastructure and subsequent investor panic threaten to derail some of the benefits from the liberal economic reforms pushed through by Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili after the 2003 Rose Revolution mass protests that drove former Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze to resign following a discredited parliamentary election. These reforms had fueled a spectacular financial turnaround in what was once a corruption-riddled economy.
Economic growth averaged 10.5 percent per year over the last three years and reached 12.5 percent last year, World Bank data shows.
The US has already pledged US$1 billion for reconstruction projects, in addition to a US$750 million loan from the IMF. International donors in Brussels on Wednesday pledged more than US$4.5 billion, a figure that “exceeded expectations,” EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner said.
An assessment by the UN and World Bank paints a sobering picture of the economic costs of the war. The document says concerns over the state of the economy appear to be well-founded.
Before the war, Georgia’s economy was growing at a rate of 9 percent annually, the report on the Georgia Relief Action Web site said. Now, it has dropped to 3.5 percent.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.