The Kingdom of Bhutan is a very special country. When in 2004 King Wangchuck announced that there would be free elections and the kingdom would be gradually transformed into a democracy, people demonstrated in the streets against these reforms. They were so satisfied with their monarchy and their ruler that they tried to urge him not to give away any of his absolute powers to an elected parliament.
Also economically, Bhutan is special. It is the only country in the world that does not try to maximize the gross domestic product (GDP). Instead, King Wangch...
ISET Economist Blog
A blog about economics in the South Caucasus.
Mar
19
Mar
15
On the 8th of March, Georgia joined many other countries around the world in celebrating the International Women’s Day. While this particular way of appreciating the many contributions of the Georgian women may be said to have been inherited from the Soviet Union, women have historically played very important roles in Georgian society and politics. The most prominent among them were Medea of Colchis, St. Nino, who brought orthodox Christianity to our country, and “King” Tamar, who ruled the state in its “Golden Age“. It was during this “Golden Age“, as e...
Mar
12
Consider yourself in Germany in 1923, entering a bar for drinking a beer. How much would you have had to pay for that? Well, the average price for a glass of beer in the autumn of 1923 was four billion Marks. One year before, you could have bought it for less than 300 Marks, and in the beginning of 1921 for about 30 Marks.
In 1923, a phenomenon called hyperinflation reached its peak in Germany. People who received their salaries in the morning had to have spent it by the evening, because on the next day it would have lost most of its value. The val...
Mar
08
Georgia’s current rank in the ease of “hiring and firing practices” and “redundancy costs” (weeks of salary an employer is required to pay a dismissed worker) is 9th and 13th, respectively (World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report, 2012-13). While a matter of pride for Georgia’s previous administration, the liberal labor legislation has become a major bone of contention between the UNM and its many critics (constructive and otherwise), including local labor unions, International Labor Organization (ILO), the European Union (EU) and the US. Th...
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