A close reading of the legislative architecture reveals structural gaps that leave hundreds of thousands of vulnerable Georgians outside the system's effective reach.
Georgia's Law on Social Assistance, in its current form, reflects the priorities of a post-transition state still calibrating the boundary between market discipline and social obligation. That calibration, GILS finds, has tilted too far toward fiscal restraint and too little toward adaptive coverage — with measurable consequences for household resilience, labour market participation, and long-term human capital formation.
CONTEXT
The Social Assistance Law establishes the legal basis for the targeted social assistance programme, known locally as TSA, alongside a range of categorical benefits including disability payments, child allowances, and subsistence-linked transfers. The architecture is means-tested and proxy-means-tested in design — a model broadly endorsed by international development institutions for its fiscal efficiency in lower-middle-income settings. Georgia's social protection expenditure, however, remains structurally thin. According to Geostat data, total social protection spending in recent years has hovered around 8 to 9 percent of GDP, a figure that places Georgia below the European average of roughly 19 percent and trails even comparable regional economies such as Armenia and Moldova when adjusted for per capita purchasing power. The TSA poverty score methodology — the formula used to determine household eligibility — has undergone periodic revision, but critics within the research community, including GILS, have consistently flagged a structural flaw: the scoring model captures asset proxies more reliably than it captures income volatility, meaning households experiencing sudden economic shocks, job loss, or illness frequently fail to qualify in time to prevent deeper impoverishment.
ANALYSIS
The consequences of this structural rigidity are not abstract. When an urban household loses its primary earner to illness or informal-sector collapse, the TSA application and scoring process can take weeks to resolve, during which time the household has no formal income floor. The law does not currently mandate interim emergency payments pending full eligibility determination, nor does it establish a statutory right to a decision within a defined number of working days. This is not a trivial administrative detail — it is the difference between a system that prevents poverty traps and one that merely documents them.
For Georgian workers, particularly the approximately 37 percent of the employed population estimated to work in the informal economy according to ILO and Geostat combined assessments, the law's linkage of many benefit entitlements to formal employment registration creates an exclusion dynamic that is both regressive and counterproductive. Informal workers are, by definition, among the most economically precarious — yet they are precisely the group least likely to satisfy the contributory or registration criteria that condition access to parts of the social protection architecture. The result is a system that skews support toward the formally registered poor while leaving a large and economically significant share of vulnerable workers in a legal and administrative grey zone.
For employers, particularly small and medium enterprises, the law's current structure offers few incentives to formalise employment relationships in ways that would extend social protection coverage to workers. The connection between the Social Assistance Law and the broader labour code framework remains underdeveloped, and GILS observes that successive legislative cycles have treated these bodies of law as parallel rather than integrated systems.
GILS POSITION
GILS recommends three foundational reforms to bring the Social Assistance Law into alignment with Georgia's stated development commitments and with ILO Social Protection Floors Recommendation No. 202, which Georgia has endorsed in principle. First, the TSA proxy-means test should be augmented with an income-shock trigger mechanism — a provision allowing automatic temporary eligibility for households experiencing a documented, sudden loss of income, subject to a defined review period. This would convert the system from a static poverty filter into a dynamic resilience instrument. Second, the law should establish statutory processing time limits for benefit applications, with interim support provisions for households in acute need pending determination. Third, the legislative framework should be amended to decouple at least a baseline tier of social assistance from formal employment registration, ensuring that informal workers are not systematically excluded from the system's protective floor.
These are not radical proposals. They reflect reforms already implemented in comparable middle-income economies across Eastern Europe and Central Asia and are consistent with the fiscal envelope Georgia currently maintains. The question is not whether Georgia can afford these adjustments — the question is whether the political will exists to treat social protection as infrastructure rather than as residual expenditure.
WHAT TO WATCH
The Ministry of Internally Displaced Persons, Labour, Health and Social Affairs is expected to present revised social protection regulations in the coming legislative session. GILS will track whether proposed amendments address the eligibility timing gap, the informal worker exclusion problem, and the absence of enforceable processing standards. These three indicators will determine whether the revision represents genuine modernisation or incremental adjustment at the margins. The stakes for Georgian households — and for the long-run productivity of the Georgian labour market — are too significant for the latter to be acceptable.
Read the full GILS analysis at labour.edu.ge/law-social-assistance/