“The lobby of the Metropole, Moscow's lovingly restored grand hotel a few blocks from Red Square, is almost deserted on this gray spring afternoon. That's just fine with Jeffrey D. Sachs, a boyish-looking 38-year-old Harvard professor who is now probably the most important economist in the world. He has appropriated a cluster of comfortable armchairs for a meeting with two members of his team, Americans who work full time in Russia. The agenda is Russia's safety net or, more precisely, whether unemployed workers will be able to make ends meet. Russia is ...
ISET Economist Blog
A blog about economics in the South Caucasus.
Mar
10
Jan
10
INTRODUCTION1
The economic policies of successive Georgian governments have arguably lacked cohesive direction when it comes to inclusive growth. There still remains an open question of whether the overall goal has been to pull people from agriculture or to leave them where they are, while pushing productivity up via, for instance, funding the development of cooperatives or clusters. Concurrently, the state also has introduced industrial policies, like establishing SME support agencies that operate under the auspices of different ministries. Trying a lit...
Apr
12
Have you ever wondered why the color of the United National Movement (UNM) is red while Georgian Dream (GD) is blue? Why not green and orange? It might be that red and blue offer a contrast, and they also symbolize quite different things.1 And, contrast is indeed what they each seek. These two parties have dominated Georgian politics since 2012, and it is now difficult to recall the subject they built a consensus around or even one that they have tried to discuss.
The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), in its report on the 2018 ...
Nov
27
A pleasant surprise awaited me on my first day as a student of Tbilisi State University’s Business and Economics Faculty. Thanks to my performance on the national admission exam (ერთიანი ეროვნული გამოცდები), I was inducted into the so-called “Elite Group,” piloted by TSU in an effort to attract Georgia’s best and brightest. There were 50 of us in the group, mostly from working class families, and none felt like they belonged to any kind of “elite.”
In the end, I really enjoyed my “elite” status. Not because I could assert dominance over “mere mortals,” b...
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