On May 3, ISET Policy Institute co-hosted a public event organized by World Bank Georgia where representatives of the World Bank and co-authors of the study, Jamele Rigolini and Sarah Call-Black, presented the resilience report "Protecting Human Capital in Times of Shocks and Crises".

Excessive tobacco consumption is an important public health policy issue. According to estimates by the World Health Organization (WHO), 32% of the adult population in Georgia smoked tobacco in 2019 (WHO, 2021). The prevalence of smoking in men was 56.9 percent – the fourth in the world and first in Europe.

Gender inequality has been a persistent (albeit steadily improving) problem for years. The COVID-induced crisis put women in a disproportionately disadvantaged position, jeopardizing decades of progress achieved towards equality between men and women.

Recently, Geostat revised upward its real GDP growth for the third quarter of 2021 to 9.1% (by 0.1 ppt). The real GDP growth rate amounted to 12% year-on-year for November 2021. Consequently, the estimated real GDP growth for the first eleven months of 2021 was 10.7%.

The development of the ICT (Information and Communications Technology) service sector is one of the strategic priorities for the Georgian economy. The sector is characterized by the unique potential to contribute to the country’s long-term growth, create positive productivity spillovers into other industries, and, in the longer term, transform the existing industrial structure of Georgia by moving away from primary production and primary exports.