A country without oil needs smart people! This clearly applies to Georgia. Not endowed with substantial amounts of natural resources, Georgia totally depends on its human resources. Yet how good is the intellectual equipment of the Georgians that is so urgently required for driving the economic development of this country?

The Kingdom of Bhutan is a very special country. When in 2004 King Wangchuck announced that there would be free elections and the kingdom would be gradually transformed into a democracy, people demonstrated in the streets against these reforms.

Georgia’s current rank in the ease of “hiring and firing practices” and “redundancy costs” (weeks of salary an employer is required to pay a dismissed worker) is 9th and 13th, respectively (World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report, 2012-13).

It is a commonly accepted view that corruption is bad for economic growth. It leads to an inefficient allocation of resources by contradicting the rules of fair competition and by setting wrong incentives.

How can a society become more prosperous? This question has been on the minds of economists and policymakers for centuries.