ISET Economist Blog

18 June 2018

Eric Livny, Laura Manukyan

Georgian and Armenian “Deplorables” and "Desperados" Taking It to the Streets

Georgian and Armenian ruling parties have been until recently basking in the glory of high GDP growth rates. Armenia’s stellar growth performance of 7.5% in 2017 and Georgia’s respectable 5% are, indeed, worthy of praise. However, do these figures really matter for the objective well-being of the majority of Georgians and Armenians? Second, how does economic growth, as measured by GDP, affect people’s subjective perception of happiness?

18 June 2018

Selam Petersson

The Quest of Finding Blue Money

Do you happen to have some 1.7 trillion USD to spare? Somewhere between 2 and 10% of the Georgian population suffers from a lack of basic access to drinking water (Global High-level Panel on Water and Peace, 2017; The Global Water Partnership and OECD, 2015). Globally, 1 in 4 people will be affected by shortages of freshwater by the year 2050 (United Nations, 2018).

11 June 2018

Ia Katsia, Salome Gelashvili

Sweet Little Lies – Things That Make Us “Happy”

On May 17, 2017, the Georgian government adopted amendments to the Tobacco Control Law with 85 votes in favor and only one against. This highly debated new regulation, which bans smoking in public places, was initiated by Parliament member Ms. Guguli Maghradze who just recently discussed the obesity problem in Georgia, which is caused partly by excess sugar consumption.

04 June 2018

Irakli Barbakadze

When Football Meets Finance, Education Scores

World Cup 2018 is getting close and football can already be felt in the air. The squads are almost finalized, new jerseys are already on sale, and fan clubs are preparing venues to watch football. These are all traditional preparation for the World Cup, but interestingly for me, and possibly for you as well, football has also affected education, specifically financial education. If you are interested in how football and financial education are linked, Financial Football is the answer.

21 May 2018

Aleksandra Markovic

Lifelong Learning and Adult Education: Should You Take a Dance and/or a Computer Programming Class?

That there is a persistent demand for adult education should come as no surprise. Most people would agree that learning is a lifelong process. A distinction, however, should be made between the notion of learning understood as a process of self-discovery over one’s lifetime and learning understood in terms of the acquisition of a certain set of skills, often for the purpose of advancing one’s position in the labor market.

14 May 2018

Selam Petersson

Air Quality in Georgia. How Are We Doing?

If you are a governmental stakeholder, civil society organization, research institute, or a concerned citizen pondering the state of the environment, the biennial Environmental Performance Index (EPI) tells an inconvenient truth regarding the trajectory of each country and its performance. The rankings provide unpolished results concerning countries and their commitments, or lack thereof, to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and other complementary international agreements.

ISET Economist Blog

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