On October 23, 2013 ISET hosted a strategic dialogue on Georgia’s national competitiveness. Eric Livny, ISET’s Director, opened the dialog with a brief presentation of the major changes in Georgia’s competitiveness performance in the 2012/13 Global Competitiveness Report. Georgia improved from 77th to 72nd position; the country saw the largest improvement in the macroeconomic environment while doing slightly worse in the labor market, healthcare, and primary education pillars.

Last year, Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili announced his plans to set up a so-called co-investment fund. It took a year for this idea to mature, but finally, a group of financially potent investors endowed the fund with 6 billion dollars.

In Georgia today and in Europe in the past, villages owned pastures where every shepherd and cattle-herder in the community could take his animals. Grazing on these pastures was free and unrestricted. This land, owned by all villagers jointly, is traditionally referred to as the “commons” (in the last years, the term has been extended to also refer to free-to-use internet content).

In his 1991 book “The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century”, the famous American political scientist Samuel Huntington (1927-2008) identifies three global democratization waves in the history of humankind. The first wave was the creation of the classical democracies in the United Kingdom and North America and the ongoing democratization process of the 19th century in France and other European countries.

While written in 1991, “The Development Frontier” by Peter Bauer has lost none of its relevance for Georgia and other predominantly agrarian economies of the 21st century. Economic development, suggests Bauer, “begins with the replacement of subsistence activities by production for sale.