Recently, I was made aware of an article by the famous Harvard economist Gregory N. Mankiw ("Defending the One Percent’’, The Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2013). In that article, he puts forward an interesting thought experiment. Assume we were in a state in which the market outcome would lead to absolute equality among economic agents.

Recently, the Georgian authorities cracked down on Nigerian students who allegedly did not really study but used their student visas for getting access to the Georgian labor market. Yet their residence permits were withdrawn without proper verification that this suspicion was actually true.

Tbilisi public transportation resembles a classic Greek tragedy. In those pieces, usually, the gods interfere with human affairs and create a big mess. In Tbilisi, marshrutkas were operating in a competitive market and state intervention led to the creation of a monopoly.

Baku today is very different from the Baku of my high school years. I remember riding a tram to school. I also remember my high school sharing a building with a vocational school. Nowadays, you will find neither trams nor well-functioning vocational schools in Baku.

It is an empirical fact that in market economies the economic activity shows cyclical patterns. The 19th-century French economist Clement Juglar is generally attributed to having formulated the first coherent theory of what are known as business cycles.