Who should be supervising the activities of commercial banks in Georgia? Currently, this responsibility lies with the country’s National Bank. However, the Georgian parliament will soon be deciding on new legislation, which, if passed, could take away the supervisory role from NBG and transfer it to an independent agency reporting directly to the prime minister.

Starting from 2005, Georgia saw a rapid decline in tertiary gross enrollment. In a country where poverty reduction is a key priority and where labor market outcomes have not been particularly strong during the last decade, the decline in higher education enrollment might appear as an additional obstacle to human and economic development.

On Wednesday, April 29th, ISET hosted Mr. Donghyun Park, Asian Development Bank’s Principal Economist at Economics and Research Department. Mr. Park presented recently published ADB's Asian Development Outlook (ADO) 2015 Theme Chapter “Financing Asia’s Future Growth”. ADO is the annual flagship report of the Asian Development Bank.

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”.

In the fourth quarter of 2014, the Business Confidence Index decreased and registered 24.9 on a scale of 100 points. This is down from the 40.4 recorded in the third quarter of the same year. The positive number indicates that the confidence factor among businesses is about 25 index points more positive than negative or neutral (e.g. a confidence index of 100 would have indicated that all firms in the sample reported a positive outlook.