ISET Economist Blog

18 September 2013

Eric Livny

Does Productivity Increase with Farm Size?

Ukraine’s agriculture started progressing after the land reforms of 2001, which established an effective land rental market. While the titles to land still belong to former kolkhoz and sovkhoz members, agricultural land can now be easily aggregated and leased to interested businesses.

16 September 2013

Florian Biermann

The Voluntariness Mantra Refuted

Recently, I was made aware of an article by the famous Harvard economist Gregory N. Mankiw ("Defending the One Percent’’, The Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2013). In that article, he puts forward an interesting thought experiment. Assume we were in a state in which the market outcome would lead to absolute equality among economic agents.

13 September 2013

Eric Livny

Moratorium on Foreign Ownership of Agricultural Land. Xenophobia, Myopia or what?

On June 28, the Georgian Parliament passed a bill imposing a moratorium on land acquisition by foreigners and foreign-owned legal entities till the end of 2014. The bill effectively reversed an earlier policy that welcomed foreigners to settle and invest in Georgia’s agricultural sector, a policy culminating in the seemingly outlandish program seeking to bring to Georgia – and offer fast-track naturalization to – dozens of expert farmers from South Africa.

09 September 2013

Giorgi Tsutskiridze

Chiatura and the Resource Curse

Chiatura is a small but resource-rich and picturesque town, situated in the province of Imereti in Western Georgia. The abundance of an important natural resource, manganese ore, was the main reason for establishing the town in 1879. Akaki Tsereteli, the famous Georgian writer from the same region, initiated manganese mining back then.

06 September 2013

Florian Biermann

The Roots of the Georgian Mining Industry

In the early 1980s, Soviet engineers drove a prospection tunnel into Sakdrissi hillock close to the small town of Kazreti, about 50 kilometers south of Tbilisi. Much to their surprise, they discovered that the hillock already bore a labyrinth of tunnels, and, as quickly became clear, these tunnels were manmade.

29 July 2013

Giorgi Kelbakiani, Lasha Labadze

Exporting Education

Recently, the Georgian authorities cracked down on Nigerian students who allegedly did not really study but used their student visas for getting access to the Georgian labor market. Yet their residence permits were withdrawn without proper verification that this suspicion was actually true.

ISET Economist Blog

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