A recent NBER working paper by Diego Comin caught my attention. The paper explores the tourism industry in Tanzania and tries to answer a few questions. The results should be taken with a grain of salt, as the methodology appears to be less watertight than in your usual NBER working paper. The sample is rather small, the data is largely self-reported, the conclusions seem rather heroic, and the paper does not appear to be embedded in a literature. Nevertheless it is highly relevant for Georgia and her tourism industry.
The paper finds that room pric...
ISET Economist Blog
A blog about economics in the South Caucasus.
Mar
21
Mar
14
Recently the Georgian government started a campaign for attracting foreign capital to the country. A whole page ad (pictured above) runs on one of the first pages in the print edition of The Economist for already a month. Capital is a necessary requirement for development. But there are few types of it. And one of them is especially important. This is venture capital.
Venture capital comprises financial resources that are invested in startups. Startups, by definition, are small enterprises. They have larger potential for growth, therefore returns, in cas...
Mar
10
We all know how inventive (and sometimes devious) the human mind can be in inventing different kinds of mediums of exchange – which we simply call money. Everybody has heard of cigarettes or cowrie shells, used by people in different economic situations as a replacement for all so familiar gold coins or Ben Franklin portraits in green. And everyone who has read an intermediate macro book by Gregory N. Mankiw must remember the fascinating story of 12-feet stone wheels used as the currency on the mysterious Island of Yap (Image 1). However, it appears that...
Feb
29
Last week, The Economist published a comparison of the costs of pancake ingredients across many countries of the world. The pancake recipe used for the calculations included flour, eggs, milk and butter – all of which are also part of the Khachapuri Index regularly compiled by the ISET Policy Institute. Thus, incorporating Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia was a piece of (pan)cake!
Table 1: Cost of pancake ingredients (12-15 portions) in the South Caucasus, USD
The good news is that pancakes (and khachapuri) are still a lot cheaper to cook in the S...
Feb
21
Recently the Georgian National Investment Agency launched the internet portal Trade with Georgia. This internet page aims to facilitate exports by providing information to Georgian firms on export procedures and regulations, and by providing potential foreign buyers with a database of Georgian products.
The customs reforms that lowered and abolished import tariffs, and reduced bureaucratic import procedures are well-known; at the same time export procedures have also been simplified. Of course one obstacle remains: Georgia can reform its export pro...
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