That Georgia is making strident progress on a variety of international indices is widely reported in the domestic press, but many Georgians may still view claims of their country ranking highly on global lists of safety and economic freedom with a degree of skepticism; after all, the average wage remains low, and there are few opportunities outside of the capital.

The latest impact of Gavrilov’s visit to Georgia has fueled societal concerns about the economic consequences of deterioration in Russo-Georgian relations. For instance, due to the Russian government’s decision to cancel flights to Georgia, residents are beginning to worry about potentially adverse economic impacts on the tourism sector. ISET-PI has already discussed the expected impact of such a change, highlighting how these concerns might be unwarranted, as tourism accounts for 7.6% of the GDP, with Russian tourism contributing only 1.8% to the economy.

ISET-PI’s leading GDP indicator forecast, made at the beginning of the year, was more precise. At the time, we predicted 4.6% annual growth in the worst-case, “no growth” scenario, and 5.6% in the best-case or “average long-term growth” scenario. While our “middle-of-the-road” scenario predicted the exact 4.8% real GDP growth.

A decade after its founding, ISET celebrates its entry among the top 10% economic institutions worldwide doing research on CIS countries. In November 2018 IDEAS ranked ISET the 142nd place out of the 1448 economic institutions in its database doing research on CIS countries. IDEAS is an international database that monitors publications in all fields of economics and ranks economic institutions around the world according to the visibility of their research i.e. how many times their online articles are viewed and downloaded.

It all started with a simple exercise for my Master’s project in which I tried to understand the underlying causes of the observed wage gap between ethnic Georgians and ethnic minorities in the country. After more than a decade, a reputable international journal has published a paper reporting on the experimental evidence my colleagues and I collected and analyzed on labor market outcomes for ethnic minority and female citizens of Georgia.