The Georgian economy faces many challenges, not least of which are access to finance and the extremely high cost of financing private enterprises. With the cost of borrowing (real interest rate) reaching 17.3% on average in April 2013, businesses find it very difficult to function, let alone invest in innovative technologies, long-term growth and development. These challenges can be directly traced to issues raised in one of the ISET Economist blogs: the Georgian financial industry is still very far from being a well-developed, efficiently functioning sy...
ISET Economist Blog
A blog about economics in the South Caucasus.
Jun
28
Jun
26
Baku today is very different from the Baku of my high school years. I remember riding a tram to school. I also remember my high school sharing a building with a vocational school. Nowadays, you will find neither trams nor well functioning vocational schools in Baku. Although I am not sure about the former, there is increasing evidence, both anecdotal and systematic, that Azerbaijan needs to rejuvenate the latter. In this post I argue that prioritizing Vocational Education and Training (VET) reform may prove to be an important step toward tackling the so-...
Jun
21
Regional development policy, defined as aid and assistance given to economically less developed regions, is an issue for almost every country that seeks territorial unity. Putting the arguments of equity or efficiency aside, states with high regional disparities are potentially exposed to the political risk of disintegration. This threat can come from both developed and underdeveloped regions. While more advanced regions are capable of independence and might even decide to strive for secession, weaker ones, especially those bordering unpleasant neighbor-...
Jun
17
There has been a lively debate on current account (CA) imbalances around the world. Georgia is not an exception with its politicians and economists often complaining about Georgia’s current account deficits (see Figure 1) and discussing potential ways of reducing or even eliminating them without actually reasoning why one should do so. It seems that these people a priori assume that current account deficits are bad. But are CA deficits always bad? The answer will depend on a country’s specific circumstances and the reasons that give rise to them.
Let us ...
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