Before answering this question, let us define what economists usually mean by” informal employment”. There is some confusion with this term, and sometimes it is improperly used as a synonym for tax evasion or illegality. ILO defines informal employment as: employment “consisting of units engaged in the production of goods or services with the primary objective of generating employment and incomes to the persons concerned.

In the first part of this article, I described some of the adverse incentives resulting from a social welfare system. Then I argued that according to Simon Kuznets' famous paradigm, increasing inequality is hardly evitable when a country enters a growth trajectory (as Georgia did in 2003), and I reasoned that it is at least an ambivalent (not to say questionable) policy for Georgia, at its current state of development, to fight inequality by social welfare measures. In this vein, the article seemed to advocate that Georgia might better follow the “Asian” approach of “develop first, redistribute later”.

One day in my village, I saw our neighbors carrying TV sets, refrigerators, parabolic antennas, and washing machines out of their house. Soon I found out that they were hiding all that stuff from the Social Service Agency (SSA) that was about to check eligibility for social benefits. Later, when I spoke with some other villagers, it turned out that some families had even sold their cows to become eligible for social assistance.

The project aims to revise the Needs Index and upgrade it to better reflect current reality. ISET Policy Institute was contracted by UNICEF to revise the Needs Index and upgrade it to reflect current reality. Ministry of Health, Labour and Social Affairs of Georgia, the Social Service Agency and UNICEF are in the process of refining the social service protection system in Georgia to make it more child sensitive.

According to a rumor circulating among economists, there exists an econometric study that shows that the economy of a nation is doing worse the more great economists it produces. While this may be a myth, casual observation suggests that the correlation between the economic performance of a country and the quality of its economics profession is indeed unclear.