Economists disagree whether it was a good decision to reestablish the Georgian competition authority. When some years ago it was removed, the underlying logic was that a non-existing authority cannot be corrupt, and, more importantly, cannot harm the economy through misguided decisions. Assuming that corruption will not be a problem for the competition authority, neither now nor in the future, regulating markets is still a highly delicate issue which yields many possibilities to go wrong.

A year ago, in March 2014, I was invited to speak at an Israeli-Georgian innovation forum, organized by the Israeli embassy. For a number of reasons, I chose 1977 as the starting point of my presentation. One of these was personal – my family immigrated to Israel from St.Petersburg, Russia, in that year. But, more importantly, Israel of 1977 is in many ways (though not in all) comparable to Georgia of today.

The Estonian-Georgian film, Tangerines, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2014. While the film was shot in Guria, the story takes place in Georgia’s breakaway region of Abkhazia during the war in the early 1990s.

On Thursday, April 2nd, Giorgi Bakradze, the Advisor in Economics Issues to the President of the National Bank of Georgia, gave a public lecture organized by ISET. The main topic of his presentation was the Formation of Exchange Rate which addressed currently occurring exchange rate changes. More than 400 students and other interested individuals attended the meeting.

A little-known experiment launched in 2009 is about to revolutionize Georgia’s countryside. “Teach for Georgia (TG)” [1] is a small program administered by the National Center for Teachers’ Professional Development, seeking to stream new blood into the public education system. With a tiny annual budget of 212,000 GEL, TG was initially conceived as a publically-funded “startup”, an attempt to think and act out-of-the-box.