ISET’s Pati Mamardashvili, the head of the Agricultural Policy Research Center, has been awarded the prestigious Fulbright Scholarship to conduct research in the USA. The Fulbright Program is the U.S. government’s flagship international educational exchange program, contributing to finding solutions to shared concerns. The main criteria for the selection in the program are academic merit and leadership potential.

The average cost of cooking one standard Imeretian khachapuri in October 2017 was 3.64 GEL, which is 0.2% higher month-on-month (compared to the previous month), and 7.2% higher year-on-year (compared to the same month of the previous year).

For the first time in history, the price of Bitcoin broke its highest record (Figure 1) rising above 2,900 USD during the last week of June, 2017. One of the reasons why the market unexpectedly became optimistic about Bitcoin could be the fact that in April, the Japanese government formally accepted1 the cryptocurrency as a mean of exchange, which gave it more validity in Asia’s richest economy.

In addition to its other exchange programs, from last year ISET has actively built up a cooperative relationship with Lausanne University. A group of students and professors from the Business and Economics Faculty at Lausanne University visited ISET early this year and had a chance to take a course in Mechanism Design, taught by Motty Perry, a Senior Academic Advisor at ISET and Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick in the UK.

In economics, there is a long-standing debate on whether emerging markets should adopt a fixed exchange rate currency regime or leave their exchange rates up to markets to decide. Intuitively, the exchange rate is just another price, similar to the price of a sack of potatoes, a liter of milk, or a kilogram of honey. Except that the exchange rate is the price of 1 unit of foreign currency (say, 1 US dollar) in terms of our domestic currency.