RECENT DEVELOPMENTS
For the first time in history, the price of Bitcoin broke its highest record (Figure 1) rising above 2,900 USD during the last week of June, 2017. One of the reasons why the market unexpectedly became optimistic about Bitcoin could be the fact that in April, the Japanese government formally accepted1 the cryptocurrency as a mean of exchange, which gave it more validity in Asia’s richest economy. Moreover, there has been significant growth of international money transfer services that use Bitcoin in order to move currency from one coun...
ISET Economist Blog
A blog about economics in the South Caucasus.
Jul
01
May
08
Tbilisi residents have already experienced a fair number of cycles in street vending regulations where local authorities tolerate, then regulate, and then evict street vendors. These cycles correspond with economic trends and election cycles starting in 2006, when street vending was declared illegal by the Tbilisi Government and the first attempts were made to enforce the ban.
Just recently, the Tbilisi Mayor’s Office restarted its efforts to restrict trading in the streets of Tbilisi, claiming that illegal stalls in the busiest places prevent mov...
Mar
11
In the last few decades, large supermarkets (referring to all modern retail, which includes chain stores of various formats such as hypermarkets, convenience and neighborhood stores) have changed the retail business landscape in many countries through larger store formats, more shelf space, an increased variety of goods and services, and extensive marketing strategies. The so-called “supermarket revolution” has been underway in developing countries since the early 1990s, and supermarkets have now gone well beyond their initial upper and middle class cust...
Feb
06
“The type of failure we’re talking about is like how frogs lay 20,000 eggs so a few wind up as adults sitting on a lily pad sucking down mosquito dinners” is how the author of the recent Newsweek article describes the rate of failure it takes to breed a handful of unicorns-tech startups valued at more than $1 billion. Failure has increasingly become a chapter in success stories; stories which inspire a new generation of entrepreneurs to try, fail, try again, and succeed.
Economics, as we have come to know it, is about efficient allocation of resources. R...
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