ISET

ISET Economist Blog

A blog about economics in the South Caucasus.
Eric Livny
May
08

On “Humans” vs. “Econs”, the mystery of human psyche, and the domain of economic inquiry

Macroeconomics
You may think that the subject matter of economics is human behavior. Well, not so fast. There is a growing body of behavioral economics literature suggesting that the subject matter of mainstream economics has been behavior by “Econs”, not “Humans”. Consider this journalistic account of “Nudge”, an influential book by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein:  Economics has traditionally ignored psychology. In NUDGE, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein take a step toward greater realism about it. […] The authors start off by differentiating "Econs" from "Huma...
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economic theory economic thought microeconomics
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Giorgi Bakradze
May
04

World of EconoBlogs

Governance and Social Policy
It’s Friday – best day of the week and day of best links from around the world of econobloggers! 1.  Let’s keep the tradition and start with two links from Michael Fuenfzig. First – a small post on identity in Georgia. 2.  And second – projects like Lazika seem to gain popularity in the world. And this post argues that it’s not finances, that the developed countries should provide to such projects. (And also have a look at Michael’s last week post on our blog). 3.  Calculated Risk blog has some nice graphs on US population distribution b...
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world
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Michael Fuenfzig
May
03

The Catching-up Game

Macroeconomics
A recent paper by Dani Rodrik has an interesting observation about Georgia. The paper itself estimates the productivity growth rates of manufacturing firms, based on a UNIDO dataset covering 72 countries. What would we expect? We could believe that it is hard to innovate, but easy to copy and emulate the productivity leaders in the industry. In this case the most unproductive firms are the ones with the highest productivity growth, and the most productive firms the ones with the lowest productivity growth. Or we believe that productivity growth is d...
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development
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Ulrich Koester
May
01

From the Comments, on Tractors and Agriculture

Agricultural and Rural Policy
A recent blogpost on tractor service stations generated an interesting discussion in the comment section. Well worth a read, in particular this insightful comment by Ulrich Koester: It is a very interesting discussion. Possibly I can contribute somewhat as I am a grown up farm boy, a ‘skilled agricultural worker with exam’ and an agricultural economist and a general economist. To clarify the issue it might be helpful to look at the experience of other countries, such as Germany. We have small farms in some regions which could be much better of eithe...
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agriculture politics
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