In less than ten years, Georgia, being one of the poorest post-Soviet republics, has overtaken Ukraine in economic indicators.
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The Russian liberal economist, former adviser to the President of the Russian Federation, and now the president of the NGO Institute of Economic Analysis, Andrei Illarionov, announced this on air on the ZIK TV channel, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
According to him, at the same time, the Georgian government, on the contrary, liberalized the economy and visa relations with Russia.
“Do you know what the Georgian government did after Russian aggression? They understood perfectly well that Georgia was much smaller than Ukraine, 10 times, Georgia was then weaker economically, its GDP per capita was a third lower. Now it’s the other way around: Georgia is richer than Ukraine, which is a very interesting phenomenon. They understood that Georgia had no geopolitical depth. How did the Georgian government respond to similar challenges in a similar situation? They said - we can defeat the aggressor only by being much more aggressive economically, in economic liberalization, in economic freedom... One of the decisions that the Georgian government made was the liberalization of the visa regime with Russia,” Illarionov said.
It is noteworthy that Georgia and Ukraine were the richest republics of the Soviet Union, but after its collapse, their economies were never able to reach the GDP indicators of the USSR.