The goal is simple, we need to learn how to manage an epidemic. Such a statement made today the Prime Minister of Georgia, while discussing the Government’s anti-crisis budget.

“The epidemic has worsened the economic situation of our country. So we have the greatest responsibility to distribute the scarce resources that the country has among the most affected sectors of the economy as fairly and efficiently as possible. That is why we presented an anti-crisis plan, which primarily addressed the tourism sector, agriculture, development and education, and we will continue in this direction.

We all need to understand that all we are talking about today is an anti-crisis budget and it has nothing to do with recovering the post-crisis economy. It is a separate group and we are working with both domestic experts and high-level international professionals.

We created several working groups in London, New York and, of course, in Georgia, where professors from the University of Cambridge and London and representatives of the Deloitte office are involved. This will be a plan of economic recovery in 2021-2022-2023. As you know, Georgia was the first country to start and complete negotiations with the IMF and agreed on a new program. The parameters that will be presented here today had been agreed with the IMF.

I would like to give you a very good and obvious example, such as tourism sector, for the rapid restoration of which, we, the Ministry of Economy, have worked hard. Today Georgia is one of the most distinguished countries in terms of crisis management and this has been acknowledged by the international community and many countries have declared Georgia as one of the first and best tourist countries. However, the Government had been conducting bilateral talks with various countries and some of the talks had almost come to an end, but the epidemiological situation suddenly deteriorated in these countries and our colleagues told us to wait for a while. This turbulence is related to unpredictability.

As you know, there are a lot of talks about the second wave, the creation of the vaccine in a month, a year or two. We all need to understand that each of our steps, both in terms of combating the epidemic and taking anti-crisis steps to recover economy, must be extremely reasonable, extremely cautious and highly measured in accordance with our economy”, - concluded Giorgi Gakharia.