The Georgian government is currently facing some tremendous challenges in adjusting to the EU Association Agreement (AA). A particularly problematic area of reform concerns the implementation of Directive 2000/60/EC, aka the European Water Framework Directive (WFD). Properly managing water resources is an extremely difficult endeavor that requires a deep understanding of all the mechanisms at work.

On May 21-23, ISET-PI researcher Davit Keshelava participated in the annual European Newspaper Congress in Vienna, Austria. The congress was entitled “Optimistic Journalism Thinkers and Facebook Criticism”, and focused on the main opportunities and challenges of the 'daily newspaper' medium, but the topics were much broader than the title suggested.

The above quote seems to fit the state of affairs in the European Union fairly well, as the EU’s crisis is continuing, getting deeper, and engulfing more actors than when it started. To name a few well-known events and stats: Greece probably had the first meaningful kick-off in the chain of developments when it faced threats to stability in its own financial system at the end of 2009. At that time, an unreported estimated deficit jumped from 7% of GDP to the first 13%, and then stabilized at 15% as the "new normal."

In what has been a decidedly international few months for ISET with recent visits to Japan, Norway, and India (as well as a trip to Uzbekistan in late October), yet another member of the institute's faculty has traveled abroad, this time to Germany.

People who decide to leave their country and test their luck elsewhere are usually no random sample of a population. In his 1987 paper “Self-Selection and the Earnings of Immigrants” (American Economic Review 77, pp. 531-553), Harvard Political Scientist George J. Borjas discusses the so-called self-selection of migrants. As of 1987, the standard view among migration economists was that migrants, at least those who came to the United States, belonged to the “upper tails” of the income distributions in their home countries.