Giga Bokeria, the leader of the European Georgia opposition party, visited ISET to deliver a lecture on anti-corruption reforms in Georgia carried out by the United National Movement government of 2003-2012. Bokeria, a UNM member until 2017, played an integral role in the Rose Revolution, which ousted the late Eduard Shevardnadze, under whose tenure Georgia had become wracked by institutional corruption.

In 1991, the former finance minister of Chile, Alejandro Foxley, said in an interview: “We may not like the government that came before us. But they did many things right. We have inherited an economy that is an asset.”

In recent years, a tendency on the part of different authorities to consolidate has been noted worldwide. Competition agencies are merging with consumer protection agencies and/or regulators in order to establish more effective and less expensive public systems. Accordingly, since the first roundtable meeting on the optimal design of a competition agency, held in February 2003, OECD has organized two more roundtables concerning changes in the institutional design of competition authorities in less than one year – one in December 2014, and one in June 2015.

ISET-PI researchers Irakli Shalikashvili and Salome Deisadze attended the Data for Sustainable Growth in Kyiv between November 17-18. The conference was organized by KSE (Kyiv School of Economics) and was jointly sponsored by UKaid, USAID, the British Embassy in Kyiv, the Embassy of United States, and the Global Development Network.

On Friday, July 15th, Professor David D. Friedman of Santa Clara University gave a presentation entitled “Market Failure Considered as an Argument both for and Against Government”. Professor Friedman is one of the leading libertarian thinkers in the USA and, together with Murray Rothbard, the most influential proponent of so-called anarcho-capitalism.