An individual living in Kutaisi took a 1500 USD real estate secured loan from one of the microfinance institutions in 2011 and had to pay 75 USD interest rate for the following 6 months. The purpose of taking this loan was to finance treatment of her child. She was unable to cover monthly payments and prolonged the term to 10 month, but failed to cover this payments again and was fined several times.

On May 23, ISET-PI hosted the launch ceremony of ReforMeter, which was attended by representatives of government institutions, NGOs, and international organizations. Welcoming remarks were made by Shamennna K. Gall, the acting Deputy Economic Growth Offices of the US Embassy, and Bruno Balvanera, the EBRD Director for the Caucasus, Moldova, and Belarus.

We are excited to announce that this week ISET will be hosting a second delegation representing the Norwegian School of Economics in Bergen. A four-day program is planned to start on April 3, which includes anti-corruption seminars, public discussions, and site visits to relevant public institutions and businesses.

Have you ever heard about a mysterious law that predicts the size of a city? If you tell me the population of the largest city in a country, I can tell you the size of the second and third-biggest cities. In 1949, George Zipf came up with the simple theory called the rank-size rule, or “Zipf 's law.” Applied to the size of cities, this law says that the second city and following smaller cities should represent a proportion of the largest city.

Marriage is a phenomenon strongly intertwined within our culture and everyday life. It is almost a “must do” thing in Georgian traditional society, and it has to be approved either by religious authority or by the state, or both. A recent study about Georgian youth entitled “Generation in Transition, Youth Study Georgia – 2016” by Friedrich-Ebert Stiftung, shows the 14-29 age cohort’s perceptions, awareness, and approaches towards marriage.