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).

In early February 2016, ISET opened its doors to a group of 7 economics students and faculty from one of Europe’s top schools of business and economics, HEC at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland.

On Monday, February 15th, ISET and the Faculty of Business and Economics of the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) jointly organized a workshop on economic theory and related fields. The workshop took place in the conference hall at ISET from the afternoon until the late evening, interrupted only by various coffee breaks, which gave the attending students from ISET and HEC Lausanne the opportunity to connect with the presenters, build up their professional networks, and discuss frontier research in economics.

The concept of food security (FS) is holistic and brings together the notions of the availability of sufficient amounts of food, access to food, food utilization (including nutrition aspects) and stability in the food supply.