March 2018 extends a long period of “business-as-usual” for Georgian consumers. The overall CCI improved by only 1.6 index points (from -19.1 to -17.5), remaining within the narrow band of [-21, -16] in which it has hovered since July 2017. All the improvement in March is due to the 5.3 index points increase in the Present Situation Index (up from -27.4 to -22.2). Expectations have actually declined by 2 index points (down from -10.8 to -12.8).

That there is a persistent demand for adult education should come as no surprise. Most people would agree that learning is a lifelong process. A distinction, however, should be made between the notion of learning understood as a process of self-discovery over one’s lifetime and learning understood in terms of the acquisition of a certain set of skills, often for the purpose of advancing one’s position in the labor market.

On May 17, Norberto Pignatti, the head of the Energy and Environment Policy Research Center and professor at the International School of Economics at Tbilisi State University, was invited to discuss good and bad practices characterizing the Regulatory Impact Assessment exercises in its presentation “Conducting RIA in Georgia: an academic perspective”.

Georgian consumer sentiment remained practically unchanged in February 2018, extending a fairly long trend of stability (or stagnation) that goes back to at least August 2017. The CCI lost a tiny 0.2 index points, declining from -18.9 in January to -19.1 index points in February 2018. CCI’s two sub-indices, capturing consumer expectations and present situation assessment, moved in the opposite directions. The Present Situation Index lost 3.8 (declining from -23.6 to -27.4 index points).

If you are a governmental stakeholder, civil society organization, research institute, or a concerned citizen pondering the state of the environment, the biennial Environmental Performance Index (EPI) tells an inconvenient truth regarding the trajectory of each country and its performance. The rankings provide unpolished results concerning countries and their commitments, or lack thereof, to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and other complementary international agreements.