We were not off to a good start in 2012. On 20 January, we lost our dear Mzia Mikeladze. Her sudden passing away has shaken the entire ISET community but life had to continue… We created a memorial fund and a special scholarship to encourage young ISET students to remember Mzia and to follow in her footsteps.

This blog post is a sequel to “Price of a Woman: Economic Rationale behind Marriage Payments in Georgia”. I recently found very interesting data about bride prices in the Georgian highlands and the North Caucasus, which I am now going to share with you.

The term “economics imperialism” has been coined in recent decades to describe a tendency of economists to meddle with such seemingly non-economic aspects of life as crime, the family, irrational behavior, politics, culture, religion, and war. Mine is an attempt to invade the world of music.

The question of the title seems to be a rhetorical one. With the 2008 global financial crisis fresh in our minds, the logic of the vicious cycle between the economic slowdown, troubles in the banking sector, credit crunch, and the subsequent industrial decline reinforcing the credit conundrums seems quite apparent.

The history of Georgian tea began in 1897 when Lao Cheng Zhao came from China to the imperial estate in the village of Chakvi.