While listening to Wade Davis, who has been often described as “a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet and passionate defender of all of life’s diversity,” the subject of biosphere reserves came to my mind. This was partly because earlier this year I conducted a series of trainings on this issue with local municipality representatives in the Kakheti region, and partly because, as an economist, I see how valuable biosphere reserves can be to preserve cultural (and of course bio!) diversity.
In August 2018, the average cost of cooking one standard Imeretian khachapuri increased to 3.43 GEL, which is 3.8 % higher month-on-month (m/m, that is, compared to July 2018), but 0.5% lower year-on-year (y/y, compared to August 2017).
Recently, Geostat released the preliminary estimate of real GDP growth for the second quarter (April-June) of 2018, which now stands at 6.0%. This is only 0.1 percentage points above the recent ISET-PI forecast. As a result, real GDP growth for the first seven months of 2018 reached 5.5%.
ISET would like to congratulate resident faculty member Norberto Pignatti on the publication of a new article (together with Hartmut Lehmann of the University of Bologna) entitled “Informal Employment Relationships and the Labor Market: is there Segmentation in Ukraine?”, in the Journal of Comparative Economics.
September 17-18 2018, the ISET’s Rati Kochlamazashvili and Pati Mamardashvili conducted a training exercise for Civil Society Organizations (CSO) running Social Enterprises (SE) in value chain analysis and development.