17
April
2015
Georgian reforms have become an internationally traded commodity. Underappreciated and no longer wanted at home, some of Georgia’s former reformers are doing well-paid consulting gigs in Mongolia, Central Asia, Ukraine, Moldova, and further away emerging markets. Sensing a business opportunity, a group of former government officials groomed by Kakha Bendukidze, the mastermind of Georgian reforms, has recently established a consulting agency, “Reformatics”.
13
April
2015
Economists disagree whether it was a good decision to reestablish the Georgian competition authority. When some years ago it was removed, the underlying logic was that a non-existing authority cannot be corrupt, and, more importantly, cannot harm the economy through misguided decisions. Assuming that corruption will not be a problem for the competition authority, neither now nor in the future, regulating markets is still a highly delicate issue which yields many possibilities to go wrong.
07
April
2015
On Friday, April 3rd, Professor Sergey Popov from the Queen's University Belfast visited ISET to present his paper titled "On Publication, Refereeing, and Working Hard” co-authored with Sascha Baghestanian, junior professor at the department for management and applied microeconomics at Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany.
06
April
2015
The Estonian-Georgian film, Tangerines, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2014. While the film was shot in Guria, the story takes place in Georgia’s breakaway region of Abkhazia during the war in the early 1990s.
02
April
2015
On Wednesday, April 1st, ISET hosted Dr. Asger Moll Wingender from the University of Copenhagen. Dr. Wingender presented his paper “Irrigation and Autocracy” co-authored with Jeanet Sinding Bentzen and Nicolai Kaarsen.