This year, the International School of Economics at Tbilisi State University (ISET) admitted nine Armenian students and one from Azerbaijan. They came to Tbilisi for a preparation course in August and all of them applied for residency permits before the first of September. All applications were exactly identical. Out of ten students, seven got their permits, two were denied, and one is still in process.

Assume you want to buy tomatoes at a vegetable market in Tbilisi. At a booth, you see beautiful tomatoes of flawless quality, red, fleshy, and shiny. Right next to them are offered semi-rotten tomatoes with corky blotches, but to your surprise, both kinds of tomatoes are tagged with the very same price. “Something wrong with this seller”, you may think and buy the shiny tomatoes.

In September, sale prices for residential properties in Tbilisi declined significantly compared to the previous year (-8.6 %). In terms of area, Old Tbilisi continues to lead the price index, at 1,143 USD per m2 in September.

Back in the middle of the 19th century, Georgia was much more fragmented and unequal than today. It was a society consisting of a huge mass of illiterate peasants (mostly serfs working the lands of their lords and the church), a sliver of urban population (large parts of which, particularly in Tbilisi, were not ethnically Georgian), and a relatively large proportion (up to 5%) of nobility, organized according to a rigid hierarchical system and controlling much of the country’s land.

In Georgia, employment is often found not through prevailing in fair, orderly selection processes, but through personal connections. This is a well-known fact almost nobody denies. It is evident in almost every Georgian firm and institution. In a hospital, you encounter a “nurse” not capable of the most basic medical accomplishments, in one of Tbilisi’s universities you meet a “cleaning woman” who is mentally ill, known for scaring everybody through aggressive and inappropriate behavior, and in the railway station, you buy a ticket from a clerk who knows nothing about regulations, timetables, and trains.