This week we use the Khachapuri Index to look at Georgia’s broader economic geography. We do so on the basis of price data for more than 100 products from each and every Georgian municipality, which were collected by the Georgian government with assistance from ISET and EU’s European Neighborhood Program for Agriculture and Rural Development (ENPARD).

On July 1, 2015, the Stakeholders’ Forum on the Tea Sector took place in Kutaisi. This was a first event in a series of dialogues about agriculture and rural development in Georgia organized by the ISET Policy Institute in partnership with CARE International in the Caucasus, the Regional Development Association, and the Georgian Farmers Association.

On September 1, 2014, the Georgian society woke up to a very unpleasant reality – after years of extremely welcoming visa regime which put the country on the map as an attractive tourist and foreign direct investment destination, a new migration law regulating foreigners admission and stay in Georgia came into effect.

ISET Policy Institute was contracted by the OECD to assess selected policy dimensions of the EU Small Business Act for Georgia. In order to complete this task, ISET-PI conducted desk research of the existing literature and conducted interviews with government officials, private sector representatives and members of the SME community, including civil society.

The average cost of cooking one standard Imeretian Khachapuri in October 2014 was 3.35 GEL, which is 0.1% lower both month-on-month (m/m, that is compared to the previous month) and year-on-year (y/y, that is compared to the same month of last year). Foreign currency earners have been affected differentially, depending on whether they are earning their income in USD or EUR.