Georgian agriculture was more developed in Soviet times than it is today. Despite great overall technological progress almost everywhere in the last 20 years, Georgia moved back when it comes to agriculture. In the year 1990, at the end of the Soviet Union, the number of cattle exceeded 4 million, while today it is just a little more than 1 million.

Last year, Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili announced his plans to set up a so-called co-investment fund. It took a year for this idea to mature, but finally, a group of financially potent investors endowed the fund with 6 billion dollars.

In his 1991 book “The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century”, the famous American political scientist Samuel Huntington (1927-2008) identifies three global democratization waves in the history of humankind. The first wave was the creation of the classical democracies in the United Kingdom and North America and the ongoing democratization process of the 19th century in France and other European countries.

While written in 1991, “The Development Frontier” by Peter Bauer has lost none of its relevance for Georgia and other predominantly agrarian economies of the 21st century. Economic development, suggests Bauer, “begins with the replacement of subsistence activities by production for sale.

Do development projects reach their stated objectives, such as reducing poverty, improving skills, creating jobs, etc.? This turns out to be a complicated question about project impact that a simple before-and-after measurement would not help answer. Why?