There are different ways to measure the success of nations. Various surveys are conducted and different indices are compiled to measure the well-being of countries across the world. Nowadays, there is an increasing interest to measure a country’s success not just in economic terms but far more broadly.
Fortunately, Georgia is getting better and better integrated in these types of comparative studies, giving us an idea of where we stand.
Table 1: Georgia’s recent rankings in a sample of surveys:
Legatum Prosperity Index 2012 is the one I will revie...
ISET Economist Blog
A blog about economics in the South Caucasus.
Dec
07
Dec
05
The possibility of lowering electricity and gas tariffs has become one of the top discussion topics across the country in the last few weeks. Little wonder of the interest in this topic at the time when gas and electricity bills reach their annual peak in account of the increased use of electricity and gas during the winter period.
Having thought for some time about the feasibility of reducing electricity and gas tariffs in the near future, one comes across three questions that need to be addressed before jumping to hasty and potentially regrettable deci...
Dec
03
A few days after the beginning of the August 2008 war with Russia, I found myself on an epic journey through Kvemo Kartli and the volcanic plateau of Samtkhe-Javakheti to Turkey. In an effort to take my family to safety, I was driving a fully-loaded off-road vehicle on what was marked on my map as a “road” from Tbilisi via Tetri Tskharo and Tsalka to Akhatsikhe. This journey of 270 km took about 36 hours, including one hard-to-forget night at a “hotel” in Tsalka (yes, there was and still is such an establishment in Tsalka!). Ok, I admit to taking a littl...
Nov
30
We may recall that the Lazika city project has been proposed by the Saakashvili administration to accelerate the process of urbanization. A new city was suggested as a means of absorbing surplus rural population and thus paving the way for land consolidation and greater productivity in agriculture. No country, it was claimed, was able to modernize itself while maintaining almost 50% in rural employment.
Yet, if we look at the global statistics, Georgia is reasonably urbanized. With 53.2% of urban dwellers, Georgia is ranked 107 in the world, slightly beh...
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