The YFN Georgia blog offers an interesting angle to the opening of the new Kutaisi airport:
A major hindrance to the development of high-value horticulture exports from western Georgia is the limited availabity of air freight capacity from Batumi Airport. Most flights from Batumi are oriented towards Ukraine; only one service to the Persian Gulf is available, to Kuwait City. Hopefully Kutaisi will offer airfreight routes to Dubai and Qatar, which will provide new markets for high value cut flowers, citrus and fresh herbs.
Check out the othe...
ISET Economist Blog
A blog about economics in the South Caucasus.
Sep
29
Sep
26
As any other labor-exporting country, Georgia faces both the costs and benefits of migration. The main costs include human capital flight – the so-called “brain drain” – and the distortion of the age and gender structure of the population.
The benefits include alleviating social pressures caused by high unemployment rates, the international experience and skills returning migrants bring back to their home countries, and, very importantly, the remittances, or money transfers, that emigrants make to their families. For many households in Georgia these mone...
Sep
18
Located only 800m from the South Ossetian border, the village of Kvemo Nikozi was swept by the invading Russian troops in August 2008. Three years later, it became a subject of an interesting economic experiment: a farmer coop.
Nikozi cooperative is anything but a grassroots initiative. The Ministry of Agriculture and the Agricultural Development Fund (ADF) played a key role in bringing all the stakeholders together, planting the seeds of cooperation, and providing all the essential inputs to keep this exotic flower alive.
Nikozi is also not quite a coop...
Sep
13
The history of Georgian tea began in 1897 when Lao Cheng Zhao came from China to the imperial estate in the village of Chakvi. Lao, whose house still stands on the seashore, brought high-quality tea seeds to the country; and the first tea was harvested in 1902. The product is now so bad that local tea growers call poor-quality tea “Lao-class”. However, in 1903, Chakvi tea began to win prizes at international exhibitions.
Georgian tea was the best of all teas produced in the USSR and competed successfully with Ceylon and Indian teas. However, as a...
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