One of the current economic mysteries of the South Caucasus and the source of certain uneasiness on the part of world development organizations has been the significant rise in the recent years of the consumption to output ratio in Georgia.

Recently the Georgian government started a campaign for attracting foreign capital to the country. A whole page ad (pictured above) runs on one of the first pages in the print edition of The Economist for already a month.

We all know how inventive (and sometimes devious) the human mind can be in inventing different kinds of mediums of exchange – which we simply call money. Everybody has heard of cigarettes or cowrie shells, used by people in different economic situations as a replacement for all so familiar gold coins or Ben Franklin portraits in green.

Last week, The Economist published a comparison of the costs of pancake ingredients across many countries of the world. The pancake recipe used for the calculations included flour, eggs, milk, and butter – all of which are also part of the Khachapuri Index regularly compiled by the ISET Policy Institute.

How much foreign wealth does a country really have? In the Balance of Payments Accounts, the net foreign wealth is essentially the difference between the assets held by the country’s residents abroad and the country’s liabilities to foreigners, valued at the market price in each given year.