ISET Economist Blog

11 September 2015

Medea Davlasheridze, Irakli Kochlamazashvili, Lasha Lanchava, Charles Johnson

Empowering Georgian ‘Plow Mothers’ (Gutnis Deda)

Giving women voice in company management may prove beneficial for performance. For instance, according to an influential Catalyst report, The Bottom Line: Corporate Performance and Women’s Representation on Boards, “companies that achieve [gender] diversity and manage it well attain better financial results, on average, than other companies.”

07 September 2015

Charles Johnson, Lasha Lanchava

Un-Muzzling the Persian Panther: Where Georgia Stands to Gain from an Iran without Sanctions

There is a distant rumble in the regional economy – one with a particularly Persian flair. Iranian commerce and exports are about to enter an unrestricted world market as part of the deal negotiated between Western partners and Iranian leadership over its nuclear enrichment program. If Iran can meet the terms of the agreement, sanctions on its exports and imports will be lifted within the next year.

04 September 2015

Lasha Lanchava

Pavlovian Priests and the Sorry State of LGBT Rights in Georgia

According to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, the word gay refers to a cheerful, lively, and high-spirited person. The LGBT Prague Pride Parade, which I was fortunate to observe on my recent visit to Prague, lived to the very definition of the word. What I saw was fabulous: unicorns and countless rainbow-colored flags, balloons, and thousands of exalted people dancing and singing in the middle of Wenceslas Square.

24 July 2015

Charles Johnson

Exclusive Interview with Professor Matthias Matthijs: Greece and the Eurozone Crisis

Today I’m sitting down for a conversation across a continent and an ocean. Our guest is Professor Matthias Matthijs of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He is the editor of the renowned and timely book “The Future of the Euro,” and a two-time recipient of the Max M. Fisher Award for excellence in teaching at SAIS. We will be talking about the Eurozone crisis and the lessons other small-state economies and their policymakers can learn from Greece’s unfortunate situation.

17 July 2015

Tamari Giorgadze, Irakli Kochlamazashvili, Eric Livny

Tea: a Potential Gold Mine of Georgian Agriculture?

The first tea bushes appeared in Western Georgia in 1847, and since then tea production has played a significant, yet widely unknown, role in Georgia’s history. The humid and subtropical climate of Western Georgia in the regions of Guria, Samegrelo, Adjara, Imereti, and Abkhazia are ideal for harvesting tea, and this was a fact eventually recognized by businessmen outside Georgia.

13 July 2015

Salome Gelashvili

Where Is the Free Lunch?

An average Georgian household spends more than 40% of its budget on food. It, therefore, stands to reason that Georgian consumers are quite sensitive to food prices, which may be very good news considering recent developments in global commodity markets. According to the latest World Bank’s Food Price Watch, “international food prices declined by 14% between August 2014 and May 2015, sliding into a five-year low.”

ISET Economist Blog

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