On February 18, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development’s (EBRD) lead economist for Central Asia and Georgia, Agris Preimanis, delivered two presentations at ISET titled: 1) “Oil-driven Russia downturn adds to weakness in EBRD economies” and 2) “Innovation in Transition”.

Bubbles belong to the most fascinating phenomena in a market. Suddenly, people are willing to pay prices that are completely out of touch with the fundamental economic values of assets. In the stock market bubble of the 1920s, persons who had never before considered becoming investors borrowed money and bought shares, so as not to miss out on the chance to become rich.

Since October 2014, ISET has been regularly collecting and delivering scrap paper to Makuliteratura. Established in 2012, Makuliteratura is an organization that collects waste paper (old books, papers, magazines, and newspapers) and exchanges the waste paper it receives for new books.

According to Geostat’s rapid growth estimates, Georgia’s real GDP declined by 0.5% in November 2014 (Chart 1). Despite this, growth in the first eleven months of 2014 was a robust 5%, which is certainly a much better result than most countries in the region could boast. The ISET fourth-quarter GDP forecast predicts 3.9% growth in the last three months of 2014.

It is a moment the entire ISET community has been eagerly waiting for the last 6 years, ever since its first class graduated in 2008. Asya Shchepetova, the most Georgian Ukrainian economist, has just defended her doctoral dissertation and received an economics Ph.D. degree from the Toulouse School of Economics in France, a global leader in the field of industrial organization and competition policy.