On February 14, Prof. Muhammad Asali delivered a research seminar and presented his work on the relationship between the labor market and the healthiness of the economy. The paper, entitled “Labor Market Discrimination and the Macroeconomy,” which is a joint work with his former student Ms. Rusudan Gurashvili, aimed at measuring and documenting the discriminatory wage gaps in Georgia within gender and ethnic dimensions.

On May 17, 2017, the Georgian government adopted amendments to the Tobacco Control Law with 85 votes in favor and only one against. This highly debated new regulation, which bans smoking in public places, was initiated by Parliament member Ms. Guguli Maghradze who just recently discussed the obesity problem in Georgia, which is caused partly by excess sugar consumption.

As a key finding in this year’s EPI-scoring, air quality keeps deteriorating human health in such a manner that it is considered as “…the leading environmental threat to public health” (EPI, 2018). The exposure of pollution and its particles from e.g. heavy traffic is a contributing factor. In Sweden, the transporting sector constitutes 1/3 of the total CO2 emissions.

Back in 1991, I attended a big “Does Socialism Have a Future?” conference hosted by my alma mater, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The session I remember most vividly featured a Hungarian dissident, a poet, ridiculing ineffective communist propaganda. “Communists”, he told a sympathetic audience, “tried to convince us that jeans can cause impotence in young males and that Coca Cola is bad for people’s health”.

The Environmental Performance Indicator (EPI), a list produced by Yale University and Columbia University, has revealed the scoring of 180 countries and their performance regarding Ecosystem Vitality (the protection of natural resource services) and Environmental Health (i.e. progress in air pollution or protection of drinking waters that can endanger human health if not considered).