Nodar Dumbadze has a reputation for bringing tears and laughs out of his readers. Yet, when watching his “Hellados” performed in the tiny municipal “Culture House” in Terjola, we were laughing and crying not only in appreciation of Dumbadze's rare ability to weave tragedy and comedy into a single narrative. We were certainly moved by Dumbadze’s story of teenagers growing up in the tough multiethnic environment of Sukhumi, the love-hate relationship between the Georgian Jemal and the Greek Ianguli, and their ultimate love for their homeland.

Back in the middle of the 19th century, Georgia was much more fragmented and unequal than today. It was a society consisting of a huge mass of illiterate peasants (mostly serfs working the lands of their lords and the church), a sliver of urban population (large parts of which, particularly in Tbilisi, were not ethnically Georgian), and a relatively large proportion (up to 5%) of nobility, organized according to a rigid hierarchical system and controlling much of the country’s land.

In the first part of this article, I described some of the adverse incentives resulting from a social welfare system. Then I argued that according to Simon Kuznets' famous paradigm, increasing inequality is hardly evitable when a country enters a growth trajectory (as Georgia did in 2003), and I reasoned that it is at least an ambivalent (not to say questionable) policy for Georgia, at its current state of development, to fight inequality by social welfare measures. In this vein, the article seemed to advocate that Georgia might better follow the “Asian” approach of “develop first, redistribute later”.

On May 23, 2014, ISET hosted a presentation by Dr. Ira Gang from Rutgers University, who presented his paper titled: “Is women’s ownership of land a panacea in developing countries? evidence from land-owning farm households in Malawi”.

After suffering a temporary setback in April 2014, the year-on-year growth rate in May is back to upper single digits (6.3%). However, macro indicators suggest that the economic landscape has hardly changed between April and May.