ISET Economist Blog

29 March 2012

Yaroslava Babych

The Georgian Consumption Puzzle

One of the current economic mysteries of the South Caucasus and the source of certain uneasiness on the part of world development organizations has been the significant rise in the recent years of the consumption to output ratio in Georgia.

23 March 2012

Giorgi Bakradze

World of EconoBlogs

End of the week –and a fresh serving of interesting links from economist bloggers and blogging economists. 1.  Joe Weisenthal from the Business Insider tells us how Ben Bernanke murdered the gold standard – and good riddance too! 2.  Nice infographics from Turbotax on the history of taxes in the US. 3.  Econbrowser discusses the prospects of the Eurozone crisis. 4.  Michael Sandel talks about market thinking from an unusual point of view. Quite illuminating, in a way. 5.  The Free Exchange blog explains (or tries to explain) several of America’s macro puzzles. As usual, excellent read. 6.  Noahpinion talks about an interesting model of asset bubbles. 7.  A very nice piece on heterogeneity from the Minneapolis Fed. 8.  Some stabs in the back of libertarianism from Noahpinion again. Couldn’t agree more, really. 9.  Witty counterfactual from our old friend, Worthwhile Canadian Initiative. 10. And from him again, something useful for those who like myself teach macro – problems with teaching SRAS shocks

22 March 2012

Eric Livny

Is small scale agriculture necessarily inefficient?

The very sharp seasonal fluctuations in the prices of many agricultural products in Georgia are indicative of the state of the Georgian agricultural sector. Agriculture provides a safety net for a very large number of jobless people who might otherwise be starving and thus serves a very important social function.

21 March 2012

Michael Fuenfzig

The Price of a Room

A recent NBER working paper by Diego Comin caught my attention. The paper explores the tourism industry in Tanzania and tries to answer a few questions. The results should be taken with a grain of salt, as the methodology appears to be less watertight than in your usual NBER working paper.

16 March 2012

Giorgi Bakradze

World of EconoBlogs

It’s Friday – so it’s time for a new portion of interesting links from around the world of EconoBlogs.

14 March 2012

Zakaria Babutsidze

The Crucial Type of Capital

Recently the Georgian government started a campaign for attracting foreign capital to the country. A whole page ad (pictured above) runs on one of the first pages in the print edition of The Economist for already a month.

ISET Economist Blog

A blog about economics in the South Caucasus financed within the institutional grant by the Government of Sweden.