BAKU, Azerbaijan, Dec.19
By Tamilla Mammadova – Trend:
All categories of national currency deposits (except currency in circulation) experienced growth in annual terms, while declining on a month-to-month basis as of October 2020 in Georgia, Trend reports referring to ISET-PI, a think-tank based at the International School of Economics of Tbilisi State University.
In particular, national currency demand deposits saw an annual increase of 3.5 percent, while time deposits increased by 73.6 percent, annually.
Consequently, national currency total deposits increased by 27.1 percent yearly. In the same time period, time deposits decreased by 0.6 percent in monthly terms, while demand deposits and currency in circulation decreased by 4.2 percent and 9.2 percent respectively compared to the previous month.
In contrast to domestic currency deposits, foreign currency total deposits increased relatively moderately by 19.4 percent compared to the same month of the previous year. In the same time period, nearly all categories of foreign currency deposits increased by more than 10 percent annually.
The annual growth of foreign currency deposits is mainly driven by the sharp depreciation of the national currency (lari). Nevertheless, growth rates are still pronounced even after excluding the exchange rate effect.
As a result, deposit dollarization increased by 0.6 percentage points monthly and decreased by 1.7 percentage points yearly.
"Despite the positive annual trends, deposit-related variables still had a slight negative contribution to real GDP growth based on our model," said the think-tank.
As far as other variables of interest, VAT turnover in October decreased by 3.8 percent yearly and increased by 13.8 percent monthly. Consequently, this variable had a negative contribution to real GDP growth.
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