The objective of the assistance program is the promotion of agro-technical activities (plowing) for cultivating annual crops and supplying the industrial inputs (fertilizers and/or seeds and/or plant protection products); and the promotion of the activities of those land-poor-farmers who only have perennial crops on their lands (the provision of fertilizers and/or plant protection products).

ISET is proud to announce that on Wednesday, May 28th, 2015 Lasha Labadze, Deputy Director of ISET Policy Institute, defended his Ph.D. thesis at Tbilisi State University, Faculty of Economics and Business. Lasha Labadze is the first ISET alumna who graduated from the TSU Ph.D. program in economics. His paper titled “Modeling effects of an investment in Georgian Agricultural Sector” was supervised by TSU Professor Eteri Kharaishvili, Head of Microeconomics Department.

On Thursday, May 28th, at the request of the Office of the State Minister of Georgia for Diaspora Issues ISET hosted Liesl A. Riddle, associate professor of International Business and International Affairs at the George Washington University School of Business. Prof. Riddle gave a presentation titled “Diaspora Roles in Development around the World: Challenges, Opportunities & Models”.

Studying at Georgian universities in the 1990s was ludicrous. The students or their parents negotiated with the heads of the exam committees and/or the deans of the faculties about the “terms and conditions”, i.e. the bribes that would have to be paid and the “services” that would be delivered in exchange.

The average cost of cooking one standard Imeretian Khachapuri in May 2015 stood at 2.88 GEL, which is 2.7% lower month-on-month (i.e. compared to April 2015). The Khachapuri Index is actually up by 1% year-on-year (compared to May 2014), suggesting a slight uptick in annual inflation, at least as far khachapuri ingredients are concerned.