Remittances now equal 13.7% of Georgia’s GDP, raising questions about what kind of development model this country is building.
Approximately 1.5 million Georgian citizens — nearly 40 percent of the working-age population — currently reside and work abroad. They send home remittances that, in 2023, totalled approximately GEL 7.8 billion, equivalent to 13.7 percent of Georgia’s gross domestic product. By any measure of comparative development economics, this is an extraordinary figure. It places Georgia among the most remittance-dependent economies in Europe and the post-Soviet space, exceeded on the continent only by Moldova and Kosovo.
The remittance dependency is both a success story and a structural vulnerability. On the success side: the money is real. It funds household consumption, reduces poverty rates among recipient families, and has provided a macroeconomic buffer during the COVID-19 pandemic, when other income streams collapsed. The Bank of Georgia and the National Bank of Georgia have both noted remittances as a stabilising factor during periods of exchange rate pressure.
The vulnerability is harder to articulate but more consequential in the long run. An economy whose growth is substantially financed by the earnings of its absent workforce has limited incentive to generate the kinds of formal, high-productivity employment at home that would make emigration less attractive. The implicit fiscal logic reinforces this: each Georgian who leaves relieves pressure on the domestic labour market, reduces unemployment statistics, and generates foreign currency inflows — without costing the Georgian state anything in terms of education or healthcare, both of which were provided at public expense before the person left.
The destination countries tell an important story. Approximately 800,000 Georgian migrants are in Russia; a figure that has fluctuated with political tensions and now includes a significant post-2022 component of people who left Russia following the outbreak of the Ukraine war. Italy hosts an estimated 150,000 Georgians, primarily women working in care and domestic service. Germany, Greece, and Turkey round out the top five. The occupational concentration is telling: the majority of Georgian migrants work in care, construction, agriculture, and domestic service — sectors with low barriers to entry, high physical demand, and limited long-term skill accumulation.
This occupational profile has a direct consequence for the Georgian labour market. The most mobile workers — those with enough capital and networks to move abroad — are disproportionately concentrated in the working ages of 25–45. The Georgian labour market that remains is skewed toward those who cannot move: the elderly, those with caring responsibilities, the less educated. This creates a peculiar demographic structure in rural Georgia, where entire villages are populated primarily by people over 55.
GILS Position: The Georgian Institute of Labour Studies does not oppose labour migration — it is a legitimate exercise of individual agency and has provided genuine welfare gains for migrant families. What GILS does oppose is the absence of a coherent national policy response to a structural phenomenon that has been visible for two decades.
Georgia has ratified ILO Conventions C97 and C143 on migrant workers, establishing baseline protections. But ratification without domestic implementation infrastructure is largely symbolic. Georgian workers in Italy and Germany are frequently employed without proper contracts, denied sick pay, and excluded from pension contributions that they have technically earned. The bilateral agreements Georgia has signed with labour-receiving countries — Italy, Germany, France, Poland — have not been accompanied by enforcement capacity or skills recognition frameworks.
GILS recommends that Georgia develop a Managed Labour Migration Strategy, a framework that coordinates pre-departure skills certification, bilateral agreement monitoring, portable pension entitlements, and re-integration support for returning migrants. The ILO’s Decent Work Country Programme 2024–2026 for Georgia includes labour migration as a priority area; the Tripartite Commission should establish a dedicated Labour Migration Working Group with a specific mandate and timeline.
The 13.7 percent of GDP that arrives annually as remittances is, in a real sense, Georgian workers financing their country from abroad. They deserve a state that manages that relationship strategically, not passively.
Read the full GILS analysis: https://labour.edu.ge/migrant-workers-georgia/