In Georgia today and in Europe in the past, villages owned pastures where every shepherd and cattle-herder in the community could take his animals. Grazing on these pastures was free and unrestricted. This land, owned by all villagers jointly, is traditionally referred to as the “commons” (in the last years, the term has been extended to also refer to free-to-use internet content).
The access to common land is unregulated, and consequently the villagers utilize on this resource as much as they can. Due to the heavy overuse, the common land in villages ha...
ISET Economist Blog
A blog about economics in the South Caucasus.
Oct
28
Oct
25
In his 1991 book “The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century”, the famous American political scientist Samuel Huntington (1927-2008) identifies three global democratization waves in the history of humankind. The first wave was the creation of the classical democracies in the United Kingdom and North America and the ongoing democratization process of the 19th century in France and other European countries. The second democratization wave refers to the time after the Second World War, when some latecomers (Germany, Italy, Spain etc.), jo...
Oct
21
While written in 1991, “The Development Frontier” by Peter Bauer has lost none of its relevance for Georgia and other predominantly agrarian economies of the 21st century. Economic development, suggests Bauer, “begins with the replacement of subsistence activities by production for sale. Producers will move out of subsistence production only if they see the advantages of doing so and if it is made possible for them to do so. They need the incentive, the opportunity, and the resources.”
And this, according to Bauer, is where the traders come in. Traders m...
Oct
19
Do development projects reach their stated objectives, such as reducing poverty, improving skills, creating jobs, etc.? This turns out to be a complicated question about project impact that a simple before-and-after measurement would not help answering. Why? The answer is also complicated, of course, but here are two points to consider:
First, when a country goes through a rapid modernization process, as is arguably the case in Georgia, most development indicators improve over time regardless of specific donor interventions.
Second, even if we observe a...
Our Partners
