On January 26th, ISET hosted a discussion on urban mobility in Tbilisi. The event was co-organized with Iare Pekhit, a non-profit organization that lobbies, advocates, and organizes for the rights of pedestrians. Iare Pekhit is creating space for discussion between urban activists, lawyers, and decision-makers on our city's pedestrian issues to drive the change desperately needed.

On Tuesday, January 26th ISET hosted a delegation of His Excellency Lukas Beglinger, Ambassador of Switzerland to Georgia, and Olivier Bürki, Counselor, Embassy of Switzerland, Regional Director South Caucasus to the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation SDC and State Secretariat for Economic Affairs SECO. The purpose of the visit was to get to know the new Ambassador and the new Director of SDC and SECO and discuss the strengthening and continuation of the collaboration.

We have recently updated the GDP series (the dependent variable in our model), using the revised GDP growth rates available from Geostat. Based on the November data, the forecast for GDP growth in the fourth quarter of 2015 now stands at 3.4%. This is 0.1 percentage points lower than in the previous vintage of the forecast.

ISET is happy to announce that Giorgi Nozadze was promoted to a new position at the Ministry of Agriculture of Georgia (MoA). Giorgi graduated from ISET with the class of 2011. He started his professional career working in the risk management department of a commercial bank. In the summer of 2012 he was employed by the National Statistics Office of Georgia (GeoStat) as a database analyst.

When I left Russia back in late 2006, attempting to cross a busy Moscow street bordered on suicide. Instead of slowing down before a zebra crossing, Russian drivers were in the habit of accelerating so as to signal their intention NOT to stop. Understandably, pedestrians had no choice but to adjust their street crossing strategies accordingly.