After the early signs of rebounding seen in Q3 2015, the Georgian Business Confidence Index (BCI) has lost 3 points (on [-100/100 scale])1 on the weakening of business expectations.

There is a Georgian joke that goes: “Relatives are the people you see whenever their number changes”. In other words, relatives all tend to gather when any of them gets married, gives birth, or dies. As a result, we frequently observe Georgians organizing mass gatherings to either celebrate or mourn numerical “changes” in their families. While there is a recent trend among the wealthier and better-educated people to switch to more intimate, smaller events, the poorer rural people continue to arrange Georgian supra of monumental proportions.

On November 24th, a Turkish Air Force fighter jet shot down a Russian SU-24 that briefly strayed into its airspace. One pilot was killed, and another member of the Russian military perished in the rescue attempt. Vladimir Putin called the event a “stab in the back” even though he had turned his back on Turkish warnings about incursions into its airspace. Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, facetiously stated that Turkey would not apologize for the event and that Russia should be the one apologizing.

On December 9-10 Lasha Lanchava from ISET Policy Institute traveled to Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (SITE) at Stockholm School of Economics to present his recent experimental work done at ISET and to discuss the possibility of cooperation between SITE and ISET.

The UNDP conference on agricultural extension, which took place on December 7-9th, featured a 45-minutes presentation of the Social Policy Research Center (SPRC) of ISET-PI. Professor Florian Biermann, head of the center, discussed some preliminary findings of the project “Farmer Knowledge Needs in Georgia”.