According to a rumor circulating among economists, there exists an econometric study which shows that the economy of a nation is doing worse the more great economists it produces. While this may be a myth, casual observation suggests that the correlation between the economic performance of a country and the quality of its economics profession is indeed unclear. The United Kingdom was home to the greatest economists of all times (Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, and David Ricardo, to name just a few), yet throughout great parts of the 20th century, the Br...
ISET Economist Blog
A blog about economics in the South Caucasus.
Apr
07
Jun
28
The Georgian economy faces many challenges, not least of which are access to finance and the extremely high cost of financing private enterprises. With the cost of borrowing (real interest rate) reaching 17.3% on average in April 2013, businesses find it very difficult to function, let alone invest in innovative technologies, long-term growth and development. These challenges can be directly traced to issues raised in one of the ISET Economist blogs: the Georgian financial industry is still very far from being a well-developed, efficiently functioning sy...
May
29
Does Georgia have a well-developed financial sector? Certainly, proliferation of bank branches and automated teller machines in the capital city of Tbilisi might suggest that it does. And yet, the data indicates that for a country of its size, Georgia has a relatively small financial sector. One of the measures used to approximate financial development or financial depth of the economy is the deposits to GDP ratio. According to the IMF data, this ratio in Georgia is equal to 30,8% (in 2011)- one of the lowest indicators among the economies at simil...
May
20
According to the Biblical Book of Genesis, Adam ate the forbidden apple, and now we all have to face the consequences: men have to work “by the sweat of their face” and women have “in pain to bring forth children”. Ever since this fateful event, known as the “Original Sin”, the human condition has become a mess, of which(perhaps) the state of the world economy provides a vivid illustration.
When economists talk about the “original sin”, they have in mind a situation where a country or company is forced to borrow in a foreign currency. Thus, as they accum...
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