On January 14-16, 2016 ISET-PI’s Senior Researcher Nino Doghonadze attended a conference centered on the discussion of, “Economics, Health and Happiness” in Lugano, Switzerland. The conference brought together interdisciplinary researchers from approximately 60 countries.

For over three and a half years, the ISET Policy Institute has been tracking the trends in the Georgian consumer sentiments. Every month a team of callers dial randomly generated telephone numbers to interview around 330 people from all over Georgia. The interviewer first asks the basic questions about the respondent’s age, level of education, place of residence, and then follows up with questions about the current financial situation of the household and the person’s expectations about the future economic situation in the country.

Retail food prices, as measured by ISET-PI’s FPI, show 3.4% increase y-o-y (that is compared to the January 2015) and 2.6% increase from the previous month (that is when January 2016 is compared to December 2015). Compared to the previous month the biggest rise in price happened for eggplant (33.3%), tomatoes (20.8%) and tangerines (14.3%).

In recent years, winter tourism in Kyrgyzstan develops rapidly and becomes much more popular. There are more than 6 ski resorts with chair lifts and several small bases with regular lifts in Kyrgyzstan. Besides them, there are a lot of building projects for new, modern ski resorts in various regions of Kyrgyzstan. The mountain territory of Kyrgyzstan provides comprehensive opportunities for their development.

On December 29, 2015, APRC representatives attended a presentation of the strategy on Food Security (FS) prepared by the working group on food security chaired by the Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) with the support of OXFAM.