On December 17, Salome Gelashvili, the Deputy Head of the APRC, presented a policy paper entitled “Challenges of Executing Technical Regulation of Dairy Products” to representatives of the dairy sector. The meeting was organized in the framework of the Supporting Food and Agriculture Business Support Organizations in DCFTA and SME Policy Implementation project.

It all started with a simple exercise for my Master’s project in which I tried to understand the underlying causes of the observed wage gap between ethnic Georgians and ethnic minorities in the country. After more than a decade, a reputable international journal has published a paper reporting on the experimental evidence my colleagues and I collected and analyzed on labor market outcomes for ethnic minority and female citizens of Georgia.

On December 10-11, ISET’s APRC team organized a comprehensive stakeholder dialogue to discuss the interim results of the RIA on draft Law on Windbreaks. The two-day workshop gathered representatives of the Agrarian Committee of the Parliament of Georgia, the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Agriculture, municipalities, the private sector (principally in the form of farmers), international donors (IFAD, GIZ), and various NGOs.

On December 6-7, ISET’s Pati Mamardashvili traveled to the UK to hold a presentation at the School of Natural and Environmental Sciences at Newcastle University.

On Thursday, December 6, the Deputy Head of the Agricultural Policy Research Center (APRC) Irakli [Rati] Kochlamazashvili, presented the ‘Georgia’s Beef Market Review’ at the kick-off workshop of the USDA funded Georgia Food for Progress (GFP) project on Livestock Sector Development in Georgia.