Georgia Public Expenditure Review

Abstract

Georgia has an impressive growth record but social vulnerabilities persist. The current government has therefore made spending on social sectors and agriculture a high priority and has launched a decentralization reform to support regional inclusive growth. It remains a challenge to tackle social vulnerabilities within a sustained macroeconomic framework. The government has intensified its efforts to reduce social vulnerability, as evidenced by the increase in social spending from 7.1 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2012, to 9.6 percent in 2014. As a result, the fiscal deficit widened from 2.8 percent of GDP in 2012 to 3.0 percent in 2014. This public expenditure review (PER) analyzes the impact of recent reforms including the social programs that were either introduced or scaled up in 2013. It gives an overview of the recent macroeconomic and fiscal developments, including the fiscal implications of the social programs in chapter one. As requested by the government, it addresses three questions in the rest of the report: (1) has the realignment of spending toward social sectors resulted in better distributional outcomes; (2) have the agriculture support programs been targeted at productivity growth to support real incomes in poor rural regions; and (3) what is the fiscal and equity impact of the ongoing decentralization process? The first question is addressed by combining micro household survey data with administrative fiscal data to analyze the distributional impact of both taxes and government spending on poverty and inequality in Georgia in chapter two. The second question is addressed by comparing the cost of new agriculture programs with their estimated impact on agricultural productivity in chapter three. Finally, the issue of regional inequalities is partially addressed in this report by discussing three different aspects of the current decentralization process: the expected fiscal impact of decentralization, the need to rationalize current capital grant programs to make public investment more effective, and the implications of introducing free preschool education administered at the local government level in chapter four.