The Kingdom of Bhutan is a very special country. When in 2004 King Wangchuck announced that there would be free elections and the kingdom would be gradually transformed into a democracy, people demonstrated in the streets against these reforms. They were so satisfied with their monarchy and their ruler that they tried to urge him not to give away any of his absolute powers to an elected parliament.
Also economically, Bhutan is special. It is the only country in the world that does not try to maximize the gross domestic product (GDP). Instead, King Wangch...
ISET Economist Blog
A blog about economics in the South Caucasus.
Mar
19
Mar
12
Consider yourself in Germany in 1923, entering a bar for drinking a beer. How much would you have had to pay for that? Well, the average price for a glass of beer in the autumn of 1923 was four billion Marks. One year before, you could have bought it for less than 300 Marks, and in the beginning of 1921 for about 30 Marks.
In 1923, a phenomenon called hyperinflation reached its peak in Germany. People who received their salaries in the morning had to have spent it by the evening, because on the next day it would have lost most of its value. The val...
Mar
05
The ability of families to meet their most basic needs is an important measure for the development of a country. Poverty touches on questions of human dignity and fairness in a society, but beyond that, poverty causes problems that may impair long run economic prospects, like crime, social unrest, and underinvestment in human capital. Given the libertarian agenda pursued by the United National Movement since the Rose Revolution, one might suspect that Georgia has a poverty problem. Is this true?
POVERTY IN GEORGIA
According to the ISET Consumer Confidenc...
Mar
01
Georgia is flooded with cheap Turkish products: tasteless winter tomatoes, clothes, construction materials, you name it. Turkish goods are everywhere – in specialized shops in central Tbilisi, supermarkets, and the Eliava Bazroba. Is this happening because Turkey is our neighbor, because Georgian people love Turkish products, or what?
Turkish exports to Georgia have been growing very fast since the Rose Revolution but they received an additional push in 2009, following the signing of a bilateral free trade agreement (FTA) between the two countries in Nov...
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