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.

The Republic of Georgia was among the fastest Former Soviet Union countries to implement large-scale land reform and land redistribution plans, starting in 1992. Land redistribution resulted in the formation of hundreds of thousands of small family farms, replacing large-scale collectives and production cooperatives (Sovkhozez and Kolkhozes). The main purpose of this land individualization process was, arguably, to help a large part of the population survive extremely hard times.

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.

It is a well-known fact that nearly a half of the Georgian population is involved in agriculture, while Georgia imports around 60% of all the food it consumes. High food import share and food security are important issues for Georgia, widely discussed among the policymakers and in the media. One issue that remains largely in the shadows of public attention is Georgia’s struggle with nutritional deficiencies and unhealthy, undiversified diets.

Georgians have revealed themselves to have overall low levels of financial literacy. Only 6% of respondents to a new research survey were financially literate, which naturally negatively affects the economic situation in the country. ISET's Policy Institute, together with TNS and TBC Bank, conducted the first-ever large-scale survey on financial literacy in Georgia.