ISET President Eric Livny and head of the Private Sector Development Policy Center Sophiko Skhirtladze held a training session for the staffers of the European Integration, Economic Affairs, and other Committees of the Georgian Parliament regarding the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA) with the European Union.

The Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement between Georgia and the EU, brought into effect in 2014, was hailed at the time by many as being of great importance to Georgian manufacturers and food/beverage producers. Yet, skeptics commented that 1) Georgia had already had more than 7000 articles duty-free and quota-free under the pre-existing GSP+ trade terms granted by the EU for many years, and 2) very few exporters had been able to take advantage of these concessions.

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.

Open Society Georgia Foundation commissioned ISET-PI to prepare a policy paper regarding the progress made on the implementation of Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area (DCFTA) in Georgia and to conduct a training for the members of the European Integration Committee and the Economic Affairs Committee of the Georgian Parliament regarding DCFTA in frames of the project “Raising support and enhancing understanding of the Europeanization process in Georgia

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.