Shaping the Future of Multilateralism - Imbalanced foreign trade, debt, and investment in developing countries: The case of Georgia

This study is part of the series "Shaping the Future of Multilateralism - Inclusive Pathways to a Just and Crisis-Resilient Global Order" by the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung's European Union and Washington, DC offices.

Georgia remains a developing country even three decades after its independence from the Soviet Union and despite its strategic location and abundant natural resources. It has benefited to a limited extent from foreign investment and relatively recent free-trade agreements with the EU and China. But its full emergence as an economically and politically resilient State has been hampered by modernization driven development agenda and neoliberal policies with too little regard for their social and environmental impacts in Georgia, as well as highpressure, counter-productive trade- and lending policies imposed by global powers such as the IMF, the EU, the United States, and China.