In Georgia, employment is often found not through prevailing in fair, orderly selection processes, but through personal connections. This is a well-known fact almost nobody denies. It is evident in almost every Georgian firm and institution. In a hospital you encounter a “nurse” not capable of the most basic medical accomplishments, in one of Tbilisi’s universities you meet a “cleaning woman” who is mentally ill, known for scaring everybody through aggressive and inappropriate behavior, and in the railway station you buy a ticket from a clerk who knows n...
ISET Economist Blog
A blog about economics in the South Caucasus.
Jun
30
Jun
27
In his famous “Advice to Scholars”, David Guramishvili wrote (translation by Venera Urushadze):
If you seek happiness and good, First taste the bitterness of gall, For bitter roots yield sweetest fruits, And honest labour blesses all.
Guramishvili is a passionate advocate of learning not as a means of getting a better job or achieving any other pragmatic objective. For him, the fruit of education is sweet because “wisdom to the wise brings calm and makes him master of his lot”. Learning is thus seen a goal in and of itself.
Judging by today’s r...
Jun
23
As an active chess player, many of my Georgian acquaintances happen to be old men, and among them are several former Soviet scientists: physicists, mathematicians, statisticians, and engineers. Ever since I am living in Tbilisi, they like to pull my leg regarding my scientific achievements. “With a Ph.D.”, they enjoy to say, “in the Soviet Union you would have been not more than a ‘candidate of science’”.
Talking with my chess friends, I came to the conclusion that old Soviet professors are prone to hierarchical thinking. And when I was collaborating wit...
Jun
20
Before answering this question, let us define what economists usually mean with ” informal employment”. There is some confusion with this term, and sometimes it is improperly used as a synonym for tax evasion or illegality. ILO defines informal employment as: employment “consisting of units engaged in the production of goods or services with the primary objective of generating employment and incomes to the persons concerned. These units typically operate at a low level of organisation, with little or no division between labour and capital as factors of p...
Jun
16
In the first part of this article (available also on the homepage of The Financial), I described some of the adverse incentives resulting from a social welfare system. Then I argued that according to Simon Kuznet’s famous paradigm, increasing inequality is hardly evitable when a country enters a growth trajectory (as Georgia did in 2003), and I reasoned that it is at least an ambivalent (not to say questionable) policy for Georgia, at its current state of development, to fight inequality by social welfare measures. In this vein, the articl...
Our Partners
