Georgian reforms have become an internationally traded commodity. Underappreciated and no longer wanted at home, some of Georgia’s former reformers are doing well-paid consulting gigs in Mongolia, Central Asia, Ukraine, Moldova and further away emerging markets. Sensing a business opportunity, a group of former government officials groomed by Kakha Bendukidze, the mastermind of Georgian reforms, has recently established a consulting agency, “Reformatics”. “The chosen”, such as Georgia’s former Minister of Health Sandro Kvitashvili and former Deputy Minis...
ISET Economist Blog
A blog about economics in the South Caucasus.
Apr
17
Apr
10
A year ago, in March 2014, I was invited to speak at an Israeli-Georgian innovation forum, organized by the Israeli embassy. For a number of reasons I chose 1977 as the starting point of my presentation. One of these was personal – my family immigrated to Israel from St.Petersburg, Russia, in that year. But, more importantly, Israel of 1977 is in many ways (though not in all) comparable to Georgia of today.
ISRAEL in 1977:
29 years since independence in 1948
Four years after the trauma of Yom Kippur War (1973)
The first democratic transition after 2...
Mar
23
Tobacco consumption is widely known for its negative effects on health. According to the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention, just in the USA an estimated 443,000 people die per year prematurely due to inhaling cigarette smoke. As there are 46 million smokers in the USA, it means that in any given year, the likelihood to “die prematurely” because of one’s smoking habit is almost 1% (under the admittedly strong assumption that these numbers are constant in the long run). If one smokes for 10 years, the probability that one’s life will be cut shor...
Mar
10
In February, the average cost of cooking one standard Imeretian Khachapuri fell to 3.29GEL, which is 3.4% lower month-on-month (compared to January 2015), and 4.8% lower year-on-year (compared to February 2014).
The main ingredient of Khachapuri is Imeretian cheese, and, naturally, its price is the main driver of ISET’s Khachapuri Index. Over the years, we have been observing a sharp upward movement in the price of cheese from July till January, and an equally sharp downward movement from February till June.
These seasonal price dynami...
Mar
06
Unlike most commodities that are provided by private actors competing with each other, a currency is provided by a monopolist. The only institution that is allowed to produce laris is the National Bank of Georgia (NBG).
The task of the NBG-monopolist is made difficult by various peculiarities that cannot be found in other markets. First of all, lari once injected into the economy are not consumed or used up. They remain in the economy “until the cows come home”, as they say in Scotland. This is starkly different to what we observe in most other ma...
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