The official visit of the Armenian President last week was concluded by a splashy announcement that the building of the “Friendship Bridge,” a new infrastructure project approved by the Georgian and Armenian Governments in late 2014, will start construction in 2017, and will be completed in under two years.
Casinos, totalizators, and other gambling institutions are very popular in Georgia. According to the study “Gambling in Georgia – Second Report,” conducted by Transparency International Georgia in 2015, 6% of 1867 randomly interviewed people answered “yes” to the question of whether they or their family members were engaged in gambling for money, including online. This figure, in my opinion, is too low, underestimating the potential engagement in gambling among Georgians.
A question of causality: Does modernization of agriculture lead to economic growth or does growth induce a modernization of the agricultural sector? For many years, this question has been hotly debated among development economists. While those economists who believe in growth-led agriculture (GLA) were dominating until recently, now the proponents of agriculture-led growth (ALG) are afloat again. Which insights does this debate yield for Georgia?
ISET Policy Institute executive director Lasha Labadze attended the fourth annual ADB-Asian Think Tank Development Forum 2016 on October 27-28 in New Delhi, India, organized by the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER), the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP), and the Asian Development Bank.
ISET's prominence in the agricultural development sector has been displayed once again with the institute's participation in a meeting led by the Georgian Alliance on Agriculture and Rural Development (GAARD) on October 26 at Tbilisi's Courtyard Marriott hotel. Led by Oxfam, GAARD is one of four ENPARD implementing consortia.