ISET Economist Blog

07 July 2014

Nino Mosiashvili

Survival of the Fittest in Georgian Agriculture

The conclusion of the Association Agreement (AA) with the European Union was euphorically acclaimed by Georgian media as well as political and economic decision-makers. Part of the AA is the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA). The DCFTA is intended to liberalize trade between Georgia and the EU by lowering tariffs and reducing non-tariff barriers. For agriculture, the most relevant changes relate to food safety (bacterial contaminants, pesticides, inspection, and labeling) as well as animal and plant health (phytosanitation).

30 June 2014

Robizon Khubulashvili

Georgian Nepotism

In Georgia, employment is often found not through prevailing in fair, orderly selection processes, but through personal connections. This is a well-known fact almost nobody denies. It is evident in almost every Georgian firm and institution. In a hospital, you encounter a “nurse” not capable of the most basic medical accomplishments, in one of Tbilisi’s universities you meet a “cleaning woman” who is mentally ill, known for scaring everybody through aggressive and inappropriate behavior, and in the railway station, you buy a ticket from a clerk who knows nothing about regulations, timetables, and trains.

27 June 2014

Nino Doghonadze, Eric Livny

The Roots of Education are Bitter... is its Fruit all that Sweet?

Even more surprisingly, as the ISET Policy Institute team found out while interviewing businesses in Rustavi, Gori, Kutaisi, and Batumi, Georgian employers do not necessarily consider education to be a major criterion in their hiring decisions. Many of the interviewees were mostly concerned about the work ethics of their future employees. Others, particularly owners of small family businesses, cared to hire their relatives, whether they had the necessary education (and qualifications) or not.

23 June 2014

Florian Biermann

On Soviet Science

As an active chess player, many of my Georgian acquaintances happen to be old men, and among them are several former Soviet scientists: physicists, mathematicians, statisticians, and engineers. Ever since I am living in Tbilisi, they like to pull my leg regarding my scientific achievements. “With a Ph.D.”, they enjoy saying, “in the Soviet Union you would have been not more than a ‘candidate of science’”.

20 June 2014

Maka Chitanava, Karine Torosyan, Norberto Pignatti

Why Care About Informal Employment?

Before answering this question, let us define what economists usually mean by” informal employment”. There is some confusion with this term, and sometimes it is improperly used as a synonym for tax evasion or illegality. ILO defines informal employment as: employment “consisting of units engaged in the production of goods or services with the primary objective of generating employment and incomes to the persons concerned.

16 June 2014

Ia Vardishvili

Georgia – A Country Between Poland and Korea

In the first part of this article, I described some of the adverse incentives resulting from a social welfare system. Then I argued that according to Simon Kuznets' famous paradigm, increasing inequality is hardly evitable when a country enters a growth trajectory (as Georgia did in 2003), and I reasoned that it is at least an ambivalent (not to say questionable) policy for Georgia, at its current state of development, to fight inequality by social welfare measures. In this vein, the article seemed to advocate that Georgia might better follow the “Asian” approach of “develop first, redistribute later”.

ISET Economist Blog

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