On Thursday, May 14th, ISET hosted Helena Schweiger, Senior Economist in the Office of the Chief Economist at the EBRD, London. Ms. Schweiger presented her recent paper “The impact of armed conflict on firms’ performance and perceptions”, co-authored with Carly Petracco. This study explores the short-run impact of the August 2008 conflict between Georgia and Russia on firms’ performance and their perceptions of the business environment.

A year ago, in March 2014, I was invited to speak at an Israeli-Georgian innovation forum, organized by the Israeli embassy. For a number of reasons, I chose 1977 as the starting point of my presentation. One of these was personal – my family immigrated to Israel from St.Petersburg, Russia, in that year. But, more importantly, Israel of 1977 is in many ways (though not in all) comparable to Georgia of today.

On February 18, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development’s (EBRD) lead economist for Central Asia and Georgia, Agris Preimanis, delivered two presentations at ISET titled: 1) “Oil-driven Russia downturn adds to weakness in EBRD economies” and 2) “Innovation in Transition”.

The post-communist world lost one of its greatest sons last week – a freedom fighter who devoted his life to the daunting task of cleansing Eastern Europe and Eurasia from the shackles of Soviet thinking and bureaucracy. Like Che Guevara before him, Big Kakha’s legacy transcends national borders. His crusade for liberty and human dignity took him in 2004 from Russia to Georgia, and – in the last year of his life – from Georgia to Ukraine.

With Russia creating or helping sustain so many “frozen conflicts” on its periphery, it is crucially important for countries and nations finding themselves in this predicament to work a sound strategy of dealing with the situation. The military option has been taken off the table ever since the August 2008 attempt by Georgia to forcefully bring South Ossetia back into its fold. Thus, countries such as Moldova, Georgia, and now also Ukraine, don’t have too many good alternatives to choose from.