Every winter, one of the most actively discussed issues of energy policy – both on TV and in professional circles - is natural gas. Prices and supply conditions are frequently part of the political debate. The main reason behind such active discussion is energy security concerns. What is energy security?

The Republic of Georgia was among the fastest Former Soviet Union countries to implement large-scale land reform and land redistribution plans, starting in 1992. Land redistribution resulted in the formation of hundreds of thousands of small family farms, replacing large-scale collectives and production cooperatives (Sovkhozez and Kolkhozes). The main purpose of this land individualization process was, arguably, to help a large part of the population survive extremely hard times.

A question of causality: Does modernization of agriculture lead to economic growth or does growth induce a modernization of the agricultural sector? For many years, this question has been hotly debated among development economists. While those economists who believe in growth-led agriculture (GLA) were dominating until recently, now the proponents of agriculture-led growth (ALG) are afloat again. Which insights does this debate yield for Georgia?

After a group of economics students and professors from UNIL visited Tbilisi earlier this year and undertook a course in Mechanism Design taught by ISET’s senior academic advisor, Professor Motty Perry (University of Warwick), a delegation consisting of ISET professor Florian Biermann, three second-year students (Mzia Giorgadze, Gela Gelashvili, Laura Manukyan) and two ISET alumni (Saba Devdariani and Aram Grigorian) paid a return visit to Switzerland.

I was 13 when my family took the fateful decision to make ‘Aliyah’ to Israel back in 1977. ‘Aliyah’ (the act of going up in Hebrew) is a nice term describing Jewish ‘repatriation’ from the Diaspora (St. Petersburg, in my case) to the Holy Land. Etymologically, ‘Aliya’ originates in the ancient Israelite tradition of annual ‘pilgrimage tours’ to Jerusalem (situated almost 1km above sea level).