Recently, we discussed the low ranking of Georgia when it comes to social capital (“Since When Do Georgians Trust Banks More Than Friends?”). In the 2012 Legatum Prosperity Index our country ranked #140 in the social capital subindex, out of 142 surveyed countries! This seems unbelievable and even shocking, but if we explore the topic a little bit deeper, we may find reasons for such a low ranking.
The World Bank definition of social capital is the following: “Social capital refers to the institutions, relationships, and norms that shape the quality and ...
ISET Economist Blog
A blog about economics in the South Caucasus.
May
08
Apr
09
Large gaps exist between male and female wages across the world. Eurostat data about the unadjusted Gender Pay Gap (GPG) represent the difference between average gross hourly earnings of male and female paid employees as a percentage of average gross hourly earnings of male paid employees. In 2011, in the EU, women earned 16.2 percent less per hour compared to men. The difference varies from 2.3% for Slovenia till 27.3 % for Estonia. The Worldbank Development Report on Gender Equality analyzed data of sixty-four developing and developed countries a...
Mar
08
Georgia’s current rank in the ease of “hiring and firing practices” and “redundancy costs” (weeks of salary an employer is required to pay a dismissed worker) is 9th and 13th, respectively (World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report, 2012-13). While a matter of pride for Georgia’s previous administration, the liberal labor legislation has become a major bone of contention between the UNM and its many critics (constructive and otherwise), including local labor unions, International Labor Organization (ILO), the European Union (EU) and the US. Th...
Jan
23
In 1993 Joel Waldfogel published a paper “The Deadweight Loss of Christmas” in which he declared that the tradition of gift-giving causes economic losses for society because recipients generally value the items they receive as gifts less than the price that was paid by the givers. The source of this inefficiency is caused by the fact that the buyer is not the final consumer of a good and thus there may be a mismatch between the giver’s and the receiver’s preferences. Waldfogel’s study showed that gifts from friends and other people very close to the reci...
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