The following blog article was conceived of within the deliberations of a project, together with UNFPA, related to the cost assessment of potential changes to the leave policies of working parents. Admittedly, like the majority of the population, I had no idea that men in Georgia have the opportunity to take leave intended for childcare. It is a fact that since 2011 the number of fathers who have taken “childcare” leave can be counted on just two hands (including the ISET Alumnus, Giorgi Balakhashvili).

On May 17, Norberto Pignatti, the head of the Energy and Environment Policy Research Center and professor at the International School of Economics at Tbilisi State University, was invited to discuss good and bad practices characterizing the Regulatory Impact Assessment exercises in its presentation “Conducting RIA in Georgia: an academic perspective”.

The Georgian government is currently facing some tremendous challenges in adjusting to the EU Association Agreement (AA). A particularly problematic area of reform concerns the implementation of Directive 2000/60/EC, aka the European Water Framework Directive (WFD). Properly managing water resources is an extremely difficult endeavor that requires a deep understanding of all the mechanisms at work.

On May 21-23, ISET-PI researcher Davit Keshelava participated in the annual European Newspaper Congress in Vienna, Austria. The congress was entitled “Optimistic Journalism Thinkers and Facebook Criticism”, and focused on the main opportunities and challenges of the 'daily newspaper' medium, but the topics were much broader than the title suggested.

The above quote seems to fit the state of affairs in the European Union fairly well, as the EU’s crisis is continuing, getting deeper, and engulfing more actors than when it started. To name a few well-known events and stats: Greece probably had the first meaningful kick-off in the chain of developments when it faced threats to stability in its own financial system at the end of 2009. At that time, an unreported estimated deficit jumped from 7% of GDP to the first 13%, and then stabilized at 15% as the "new normal."