On April 17th, ISET was honored to welcome Her Excellency Ms. Maria van der Hoeven, Executive Director of International Energy Agency (IEA), a leading international institution in the energy sector. Prior to becoming Executive Director of IEA, Ms. van der Hoeven served as the Minister of Economic Affairs, the Minister of Education, Culture and Science, and a member of the parliament of the Netherlands.

There are clear expectations in many cultures to marry somebody from their own group, and not living up to these expectations will at least cause a loss in reputation. This is nicely displayed in the movie Late Marriage by Dover Kosashvili, humorously depicting a young Georgian Jew in Israel whose parents want him to marry the “right” woman (the movie features extensive dialogues in Judeao-Georgian, another endangered language).

If we take a more detailed look at the prices of Kh-Index ingredients (see graph), the main contributors to y/y Khachapuri index deflation in March were cheese (-12%) and eggs (-1%). All other ingredients increased in price: flour (11%), yeast (21%), butter (6%), and milk (12%). As can be easily seen, prices fell y/y for locally-produced goods (eggs and cheese, made of fresh milk); prices went up y/y for goods that are imported (yeast and butter) or use imported intermediate inputs in their production (flour and milk).

As often discussed on this page, the seasonal dynamics of the Khachapuri Index are mainly driven by extremely sharp fluctuations in the supply of fresh milk, which directly affects the prices of traditional dairy products such as Imeretian cheese. However, these seasonal fluctuations in the price of cheese are consistently sharper in Kutaisi than anywhere else in Georgia.

On Thursday, April 16th, Muhammad Asali, ISET’s resident faculty member, presented his paper, named “Compulsory Military Service and Future Earnings: Evidence from a Quasi Experiment” to the ISET community.