Held on April 8, this discussion was a part of the four-day anti-corruption program ISET organized for a large group of students and faculty from ISET’s partner university, the Norwegian School of Economics (NHH) in Bergen. The expert panel included Jacques Fleury, former CEO of Borjomi LLC and JSC Château Mukhrani; Mariam Dolidze, Senior Economist at World Bank Georgia; Archil Bakuradze, Chairman of Supervisory Board at JSC Crystal Georgia; Bruno Balvanera, Resident Representative of EBRD Georgia; Giorgi Oniani, Deputy Executive Director of Transparency International Georgia; and ISET President Eric Livny, who also moderated the discussion.

Facilitating cooperation among Georgia’s smallholders is in the focus of EU’s 52 mln Euro ENPARD project, of which ISET is a (small) part. An evaluation effort, coordinated by the ISET Policy Institute, has uncovered some interesting facts and figures.

The recent resetting of Georgian-Iranian bilateral relations was in the focus of a seminar organized by ISET and the Austrian Institute for Caucasus Studies as part of the Vienna Forum for the Modernization of the Black Sea Region. Held on Tuesday, March 22nd, the seminar covered both historical and current – political and economic – aspects of cooperation between the two countries.

On Monday, March 21st, European Commissioner for Trade, Cecilia Malmström visited ISET for a discussion of EU-Georgian economic relations, with an emphasis on DCFTA (Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area). She was accompanied by Janos Herman, Ambassador of the European Union to Georgia, and Natalie Sabanadze, Georgia’s Ambassador to the EU.

Graph 1 shows the density of Georgian farmers’ revenues received from selling their produce, generated from the sample of 3,000 Georgian rural households. (For the motivation and methodology of our study, please refer to the article that was published here last week. It is also available online on the ISET Economist Blog: “Dumb Farmers Do Not Grow Big Potatoes”, by Florian Biermann and Ruediger Heining).