On June 15-16th, Oxfam organized and hosted the International Conference on Food Security and Nutrition in Tbilisi. ISET President Eric Livny was a panel member for the session on Food Security (FS) monitoring and evaluation (M&E) and discussed the major findings of a research piece entitled “Assessing Food Security Data Relevance and Collection Mechanisms in the South Caucasus” conducted by APRC at the end of 2015.

ISET Policy Institute (ISET-PI), as a part of the ENPARD project (under the CARE consortium), is involved in the collection and analysis of the market price information of agricultural products around Georgia. ISET-PI, in co-operation with the Ministry of Agriculture of Georgia (MoA) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), organized training for representatives from the MoA’s Information and Consultation Centers (ICC).

ISET students Ana Akoposhvili and Ketevan Melkadze came second place in the Mariam Kutelia Research Grant competition. They took part during their internship at a USAID-funded project, Restoring Efficiency to Agricultural Production. The purpose of the competition was to write proposals on how to improve the current state of the Georgian agricultural sector. The ISET students were awarded another paid internship at the Agricultural Policy Research Center (APRC) between April 15 and June 15.

On Monday, June 13, ISET hosted Miranda Svanidze, an ISET graduate and current Ph.D. student of Leibniz Institute for Agricultural Development in Transition Countries (IAMO). She gave a presentation entitled “Spatial Integration of Wheat Markets in the South Caucasus and Central Asia”.

As argued by Omer Moav and Zvika Neeman in a 2012 paper (Moav taught at ISET in the past), boasting is a way to pretend that one has hidden income (“Saving Rates and Poverty: The Role of Conspicuous Consumption and Human Capital”, Economic Journal 122, pp. 933-956). While people may have a rough idea of the incomes of their neighbors, colleagues, friends, and other people they interact with, they usually do not know exactly how much they make.