Today I’m sitting down for a conversation across a continent and an ocean. Our guest is Professor Matthias Matthijs of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He is the editor of the renowned and timely book “The Future of the Euro,” and a two-time recipient of the Max M. Fisher Award for excellence in teaching at SAIS. We will be talking about the Eurozone crisis and the lessons other small-state economies and their policymakers can learn from Greece’s unfortunate situation.

While Georgia never faced anything like a wartime food crisis, the agricultural policies implemented by the Georgian Dream coalition government in 2013-2015 did not lack in ambition, seeking to make up for more than a decade of “active neglect” of Georgia’s smallholder agriculture by the Saakashvili administration. In this piece, we take a critical look at one of the first government initiatives, the Agricultural Card Program, introduced in February 2013.

The recent bouts of sharp lari depreciation caused much anxiety among the Georgian population, prompting fears of inflation, loan defaults, and bank failures, on the one hand, and the typically Georgian political speculations over “who is to blame”, on the other.

On February 25th, ISET hosted Riikka Savolainen, Ph.D. from the Aalto University, Finland. Dr. Savolainen holds a master’s degree from the Helsinki School of Economics. Her research interests include applied microeconometrics and political economy and, more specifically, intra-party heterogeneity and candidate strategies. Her general interests include history and political philosophy.

Since the outbreaks of the Asian financial crisis in the late 1900s and the global financial turmoil in 2007, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of a financial sector based on a set of financial indicators has become increasingly important.