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Georgia The Economy
In the Soviet period, Georgia played an important role in
supplying food products and minerals and as a center of tourism
for the centralized state economy. However, the republic was also
heavily dependent on imports to provide products vital to
industrial support. In the post-Soviet years, the Georgian
economy suffered a major decline because sources of those
products were no longer reliable and because political
instability limited the economic reorganization and foreign
investment that might support an internationalized, free-market
economy. The net material product (
NMP--see Glossary)
already had
declined by 5 percent in 1989 and by 12 percent in 1990, after
growing at an annual rate of 6 percent between 1971 and 1985. In
late 1993, Shevardnadze reported that industrial production had
declined by 60.5 percent in 1993 and that the annual inflation
rate had reached 2,000 percent, largely as a result of the
economic disruption caused by military conflict within Georgia's
borders.
Data as of March 1994
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