This year, approximately 113 baby boys are born in China for every 100 baby girls; 112 boys per 100 girls in India, 111 in Vietnam. The looming social crisis stemming from the significant gender imbalance in the countries of East and Southeast Asia has been in the media spotlight for a long time. Unfortunately, the problem of gender imbalance is not confined to Asia.
According to the UN database, between 2005 and 2010, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia held second, third and fourth place in the world after China in gender imbalance statistics. The ratio o...
ISET Economist Blog
A blog about economics in the South Caucasus.
Apr
22
Apr
19
Anyone who has seen an old American classic “Best Years of Our Lives” (1946) probably remembers the scene where one of the protagonists, Al Stephenson, a banker who just returned from war in the Pacific, tells his incredulous colleagues: “Our bank is alive. It’s generous. It’s human. We are going to have such a line of customers seeking – and getting - small loans, that people may think we are gambling with the depositors’ money. And we will be. We will be gambling on the future of this country”
This speech neatly summed up the prevailing mood of the pos...
Mar
29
One of the current economic mysteries of the South Caucasus and the source of certain uneasiness on the part of world development organizations has been the significant rise in the recent years of the consumption to output ratio in Georgia.
The reason why such trend can be worrisome is simple. High consumption rates, including private and government consumption, imply low domestic savings. Savings, in turn, are the source of funds for capital investment, one of the important engines of future economic growth.
In an open economy the lack of domestic savin...
Mar
13
I know. I know that I know. For as long as human race existed, knowledge embodied power. In the life of a society, however, what becomes even more important is the fact that we share certain knowledge with fellow human beings, and that we, moreover, are aware of each other’s knowledge. This special type of awareness is termed common knowledge: I know that you know that I know that you know - and so on to infinity.
In theory, common knowledge is surprisingly hard to achieve. One of the classic examples is the Coordinated Attack Problem, where two armies n...
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