According to Micklewright (Macroeconomics and Data on Children, UNICEF 2000), a share of 7% of the Georgian gross domestic product of the year 1991 accounted for education. In 1994, this number had fallen to 1%. As Micklewright comments, such a dramatic decrease in educational expenditures was never seen before nor afterward in the history of any country. Recovery after the crisis was a long process.

On Thursday, November 19, ISET hosted Zurab Japaridze, a member of the Parliament of Georgia. The title of his presentation was “As of the Argonauts to Shevardnadze”. Zurab presented the economic history of Georgia and discussed various factors affecting its development along the way. The material was unique and heavily based on different alternative historical sources describing economic phenomena of the past.

The first tea bushes appeared in Western Georgia in 1847, and since then tea production has played a significant, yet widely unknown, role in Georgia’s history. The humid and subtropical climate of Western Georgia in the regions of Guria, Samegrelo, Adjara, Imereti, and Abkhazia are ideal for harvesting tea, and this was a fact eventually recognized by businessmen outside Georgia.

The second of May, 2015, may well go unnoticed by historians of the future; but I am convinced that it marks a watershed not only in Georgia’s recent evolution – but also, maybe, in the history of our times...

Some twenty five year later, the world is once again rife with “contradictions” (the elimination of which is key to understanding Fukuyama’s end-of-history Hegelian thinking). These contradictions are most evident in the ever intensifying migration debates in Europe and the US, renewed trade wars, geopolitical rivalries and religious conflicts.