Even more surprisingly, as the ISET Policy Institute team found out while interviewing businesses in Rustavi, Gori, Kutaisi, and Batumi, Georgian employers do not necessarily consider education to be a major criterion in their hiring decisions. Many of the interviewees were mostly concerned about the work ethics of their future employees. Others, particularly owners of small family businesses, cared to hire their relatives, whether they had the necessary education (and qualifications) or not.

As an active chess player, many of my Georgian acquaintances happen to be old men, and among them are several former Soviet scientists: physicists, mathematicians, statisticians, and engineers. Ever since I am living in Tbilisi, they like to pull my leg regarding my scientific achievements. “With a Ph.D.”, they enjoy saying, “in the Soviet Union you would have been not more than a ‘candidate of science’”.

Before answering this question, let us define what economists usually mean by” informal employment”. There is some confusion with this term, and sometimes it is improperly used as a synonym for tax evasion or illegality. ILO defines informal employment as: employment “consisting of units engaged in the production of goods or services with the primary objective of generating employment and incomes to the persons concerned.

On June 13, ISET hosted Dr. Dmitry Shapiro from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, who presented his paper “Microfinance and Dynamic Incentives”.

On May 31, ISET organized an excursion to an agricultural cooperative called “Gift of Forest” in Tsinamdzgvriantkari, in the Mtskheta-Mtianeti region of Georgia. The purpose of the excursion was to learn more about a successful cooperative and understand how this success could be replicated in other contexts and value chains in Georgia.