At the end of Act 2 of Bertolt Brecht’s Three-Penny-Opera, the proletarian petty criminal Macheath and his prostitute Jenny reply to the bourgeois representatives of the establishment urging them to uphold moral standards: “First comes a full stomach, then comes ethics!” This aphorism echoes the widely held contention that ethical behavior is a privilege of those who have satisfied their material needs. How can one expect somebody who is fighting for survival to be decent and honorable? Indeed, when civilization broke down during wars and disasters, huma...
ISET Economist Blog
A blog about economics in the South Caucasus.
Mar
31
Feb
14
It is well known that government intervention, be it through taxation or regulation, can obstruct the functioning of markets. Yet there is another kind of influence that may also have strong effects on the efficiency of an economy but is much less discussed, namely the set of values, traditions, and moral standards a society subscribes to. To some extent, the moral framework of a society is reflected in its legal system and in this way affects the economy, but more often an informal consensus that some things should or should not be done in certain ways ...
Dec
06
One or two years ago, a Lavazza’s take-away coffee shop opened on the side of Georgia’s east-west highway in the area of Zestaponi. You always could find plenty of coffee shops in Tbilisi, but it was a novelty to have them next to the highway. Soon afterwards, another coffee bar opened along the road, and surprisingly, it was again set up close to Zestaponi. And today, there are even more take-away coffee points along that road, and they all cluster at Zestaponi.
Travelling from Tbilisi to Kutaisi or Batumi, you will notice other such clusters. You can b...
Nov
01
Last year, Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili announced his plans to set up a so-called co-investment fund. It took a year for this idea to mature, but finally a group of financially potent investors endowed the fund with 6 billion dollar. 15 % of the capital is provided by Bidzina Ivanishvili himself, the remaining 85% are held by the Abu Dhabi Group, the Ras Al Khaimah Investment Authority (both United Arab Emirates), Milestone International Holding from China, Mr. Alexander Moshkevich from Kazakhstan, capital of the late Badri Patarkatsishvili, Batumi...
Our Partners
