On the 15th of March 1962, President John F. Kennedy delivered a seminal speech to the congress, outlining the four rights that he considered essential for consumers: the right to safety, the right to be informed, the right to choose, and the right to be heard. Ever since Kennedy’s speech, the idea of consumer protection blossomed both in theory and in practice. In this year, 52 years after Kennedy’s speech, Georgia will pass a new law on the protection of consumer rights. Let us have a look at consumer protection in general, in Georgia, and at the ...
ISET Economist Blog
A blog about economics in the South Caucasus.
Mar
07
Mar
03
On the 14th of February, the Ministry of Economy and Sustainable Development of Georgia published the draft version of the Socio-economic Development Strategy 2020 (SDS). This comprehensive document identifies the main socio-economic challenges Georgia will be facing in the next years and presents a strategy how to cope with them. The overall goal is to achieve sustainable and inclusive growth until the end of this decade.
The spirit of the document very much reflects the principles of the new government. There is no belief in the self-regulatory power o...
Feb
21
Georgian households, being as poor as they are, don't save enough for the rainy day. Do low savings imply that Georgians are impatient to consume and do not care about their future? Is it in our genes that we prefer today’s egg to tomorrow’s chicken? Maybe our history, the history of a small nation struggling for survival, taught us to live our lives one day at a time?
Let’s face it: while culture may definitely play a role in people’s attitude to saving (an issue to which we will come back in the second part of this article), the vast majority of G...
Feb
10
Over the winter holidays, I had the leisure to read the book “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty” by MIT economist Daron Acemoglu and Harvard political scientist James A. Robinson (Crown Business 2012, 544 pages, Hardcover $20.00). Both authors are very eminent – one would not be surprised if Acemoglu, a Turkish-born Armenian and the most frequently cited contemporary economist, would receive the Nobel Prize in economics somewhere down the road.
After reading the book, I was rather disappointed, because it appeared to me as i...
Feb
03
The value of a currency, measured in terms of other currencies, has consequences for the real economy. A more expensive lari, for example, makes it more profitable to import goods into Georgia. The importer has to pay the foreign goods with foreign currency, and when the lari is more valuable, less lari are needed to pay for them. Driven by competition, importing companies will forward some of this cost reduction to the consumers and charge lower prices for imported goods.
At the same time, an appreciation of the lari puts a burden on exporters. A bottle...
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