Agriculture makes an important contribution to economic development in Georgia. Value added in agriculture accounted for 9.3% of Georgian GDP in 2013 and 53.4% of employment (World Bank, 2014a). Agriculture also provides an essential basis for the food, beverages and tobacco processing industries, which together accounted for just over one-third of value added in manufacturing in Georgia in 2010.

One of the most puzzling aspects of the Georgian labor market is what is known as the “qualification mismatch”. While unemployment is high, many positions remain vacant due to a lack of qualified applicants.

Over the last weekend, I was invited by an international development bank to run a workshop in the nice Hotel Eden in Kvareli, Kakheti. The topic of the workshop was “Georgia’s economic future”.

On November 20, 2014, Dr. Sergei Chobanyan professor of ISET and Georgian Technical University, Senior Scientist at the Niko Muskhelishvili Institute of Computational Mathematics of Georgian Technical University, held a presentation “On the Volume Calendar Planning Problem” at the ISET Conference Hall.

The average cost of cooking one standard Imeretian Khachapuri in October 2014 was 3.35 GEL, 0.1% lower both in month-on-month comparison (m/m, that is compared to the previous month) and year-on-year comparison (y/y, that is compared to the same month of last year).