In the year of elections, any piece of economic analysis is usually seasoned with a hefty dose of caution. Every analyst is aware of the fact that the incumbents will be too eager to oversell the ‘good’, while the opposition will pound on the ‘bad’. Weary of taking sides in political battles, economists usually switch on their primary defense mechanism: they start relying (heavily) on the annoying “on the one hand”, “on the other hand” kinds of phrases. I am of course referring to Georgia in the year 2016.

Matsatso Tepnadze, ISET class 2012, has been recently appointed head of the division of planning for infrastructure projects at the Ministry of Regional Development and Infrastructure of Georgia (MRDI). This division is in charge of elaborating project selection and planning methods, based on a systemic evaluation of strategic public infrastructure projects.

On Monday, May 18th, ISET hosted Mr. Jan Klingelhöfer from RWTH Aachen University who presented his paper titled “The Swing Voters' Blessing" to the ISET community. The paper deals with the following question: can democracy work well if the electorate is neither fully informed nor fully rational?

On Monday, May 4th, Yaroslava Babych, Academic Director of ISET Policy Institute, participated in a conference “Gender Biased Sex Selection in Georgia: Context, Evidence, Implications and Proposed Solutions” jointly organized by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the World Bank that took place in Tbilisi, Georgia.

On February 16th, ISET hosted David Bostashvili PhD. from the University of Houston. Dr. Bostashvili presented his job market paper: “Political Budget cycles and Civil Service in American State Governments”. The motivation for this paper was an observation that all levels of government tend to spend budgets right before elections.