On Thursday, April 2nd, Giorgi Bakradze, the Advisor in Economics Issues to the President of the National Bank of Georgia, gave a public lecture organized by ISET. The main topic of his presentation was the Formation of Exchange Rate which addressed currently occurring exchange rate changes. More than 400 students and other interested individuals attended the meeting.
On Wednesday, April 1st, ISET hosted Dr. Asger Moll Wingender from the University of Copenhagen. Dr. Wingender presented his paper “Irrigation and Autocracy” co-authored with Jeanet Sinding Bentzen and Nicolai Kaarsen.
A little-known experiment launched in 2009 is about to revolutionize Georgia’s countryside. “Teach for Georgia (TG)” [1] is a small program administered by the National Center for Teachers’ Professional Development, seeking to stream new blood into the public education system. With a tiny annual budget of 212,000 GEL, TG was initially conceived as a publically-funded “startup”, an attempt to think and act out-of-the-box.
Khachapuri index kept declining in March with the average cost of cooking one standard Imeretian Khachapuri reaching 3.15 GEL. This is 7% lower month-on-month (compared to February 2015), and 3.1% lower year-on-year (compared to March 2014).
While Georgia never faced anything like a wartime food crisis, the agricultural policies implemented by the Georgian Dream coalition government in 2013-2015 did not lack in ambition, seeking to make up for more than a decade of “active neglect” of Georgia’s smallholder agriculture by the Saakashvili administration. In this piece, we take a critical look at one of the first government initiatives, the Agricultural Card Program, introduced in February 2013.