13
April
2015
Economists disagree whether it was a good decision to reestablish the Georgian competition authority. When some years ago it was removed, the underlying logic was that a non-existing authority cannot be corrupt, and, more importantly, cannot harm the economy through misguided decisions. Assuming that corruption will not be a problem for the competition authority, neither now nor in the future, regulating markets is still a highly delicate issue which yields many possibilities to go wrong.
10
April
2015
A year ago, in March 2014, I was invited to speak at an Israeli-Georgian innovation forum, organized by the Israeli embassy. For a number of reasons, I chose 1977 as the starting point of my presentation. One of these was personal – my family immigrated to Israel from St.Petersburg, Russia, in that year. But, more importantly, Israel of 1977 is in many ways (though not in all) comparable to Georgia of today.
27
March
2015
On Thursday, March 26th, Dr. Nani Macharashvili, from TSU delivered a lecture in which she touched on the importance of the deliberative model of public policymaking.
28
November
2014
Agriculture makes an important contribution to economic development in Georgia. Value added in agriculture accounted for 9.3% of Georgian GDP in 2013 and 53.4% of employment (World Bank, 2014a). Agriculture also provides an essential basis for the food, beverages and tobacco processing industries, which together accounted for just over one-third of value added in manufacturing in Georgia in 2010.
23
September
2014
About 9 months ago, we were already discussing the oddities of egg prices in Georgia (“The Georgian Egg of Discord”, by Giorgi Kelbakiani and Eric Livny). At that time, huge volatility in egg prices could be explained by interesting political dynamics. Under the UNM government, local producers of eggs were largely protected from external competition through non-tariff import barriers, called by the ministry of agriculture a “complete violation of law and international agreements”.
