Mercator Fellowship joins ISET researchers for wine tour
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On May 27 2017, German and Swiss students and professionals from The Mercator Fellowship, together with ISET researchers, visited Kakheti for a wine tour.
The Mercator Fellowship on International Affairs is a project jointly run by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation and the Stiftung Mercator, in cooperation with the Federal Foreign Office, the Swiss Study Foundation, the Mercator Foundation Switzerland, and the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs.
Mercator Fellows work in international organizations or business enterprises for 13 months. They contribute to projects in a number of different areas, such as sustainable agricultural development, climate change, renewable energies, international human rights, peace and security, among others. During their visit to Georgia, Mercator program directors and Fellows of 2016-2017 met with representatives of the Georgian government and the private sector to learn more about Georgia’s current policy agenda and economic development.
Eliciting the hidden costs of business – talk by Pavan Sukhdev
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On the 25th of May, ISET was pleased to host the environmental economist and founder of the consultancy company GIST Advisory, Pavan Sukhdev, for a presentation. Starting his career as a physicist, Mr. Sukhdev got interested in the challenges of environment protection. This led him to investigate economics, particularly aiming at understanding the significance of businesses as a driver of the changes that we see around us as well as third party impacts, which are known as externalities in economics. Mr. Sukhdev highlighted corporate externalities as being the “biggest free lunch in human history”. Created by private companies, externalities cause huge damages. Companies earn profits at the expense of public losses, reaching from 10 to 15 trillion dollars or 15-20% of global GDP. A study by the NGO “Trucost” found that in 2010 five sectors, namely electricity, oil and gas, industrial metals and mining, food and construction are responsible for about 60% of environmental cost. Yet, as pointed out by Mr. Sukhdev, the private sector operates in the scope of legal framework and can therefore be influenced and regulated by the society.
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