
Early next month, the eyes of the world will briefly turn to Switzerland. On June 5th, the citizens of this prosperous country will vote in an unprecedented referendum on the idea of guaranteeing each citizen a basic income equivalent to roughly 30,000 USD per year.

ISET is proud to congratulate Salome Baslandze, an ISET graduate of 2011, on her recent appointment as an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance (EIEF) in Rome.

According to a study from 2015 by WIN/Gallup, 93% of Georgians consider themselves to be religious. There is only one country in the world that has a higher rate, namely Thailand, where this number stands at 94%, while the same percentage of religious people as in Georgia could only be found in Armenia, Bangladesh, and Morocco. All other nations of the world are less enchanted about religion.

The 17th Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty, held March 14-18, 2016, at the World Bank Headquarters in Washington D.C., gathered stakeholders from government, the development community, private sector, and academia to discuss land policy issues worldwide. ISET-PI was represented by Pati Mamardashvili, head of our Agricultural Policy Research Center (APRC).

The Quality of Living Survey 2012 of the international consultancy group Mercer ranks 222 cities in the world according to how livable they are. Tbilisi was ranked on Place 213, provoking furious reactions by many Georgians. On the internet, it is easy to find wild slanders against those who created the ranking and even against those who just referred to it, and there was even an online petition initiated against the ranking.