On May 29th, the ISET’s Salome Gelashvili spoke at the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development – Tbilisi Implementation Conference hosted by the Parliament of Georgia and held at the Radisson Blu Iveria Hotel from May 28th to 29th. She participated in a panel discussion on data for sustainable development.

The average cost of cooking one standard Imeretian khachapuri in April 2018 across Georgian cities varied, from 2.90 GEL (the lowest price, observed in Kutaisi), to 3.60 GEL (the highest price, observed in Tbilisi). The price difference between Kutaisi and Tbilisi amounted 0.70 GEL, which is one of the highest differentials we have ever observed between these cities.

On May 25-27, the FREE Network Retreat was held in Minsk, Belarus. The Forum for Research on Eastern Europe and Emerging Economies (FREE) is a joint initiative of SITE (Stockholm), BEROC (Minsk), BICEPS (Riga), CEFIR (Moscow), KSE (Kyiv), and ISET (Tbilisi). All members meet annually and share their experiences.

March 2018 extends a long period of “business-as-usual” for Georgian consumers. The overall CCI improved by only 1.6 index points (from -19.1 to -17.5), remaining within the narrow band of [-21, -16] in which it has hovered since July 2017. All the improvement in March is due to the 5.3 index points increase in the Present Situation Index (up from -27.4 to -22.2). Expectations have actually declined by 2 index points (down from -10.8 to -12.8).

On May 17, Norberto Pignatti, the head of the Energy and Environment Policy Research Center and professor at the International School of Economics at Tbilisi State University, was invited to discuss good and bad practices characterizing the Regulatory Impact Assessment exercises in its presentation “Conducting RIA in Georgia: an academic perspective”.