On December 13, Ellie Martus, a co-fund fellow at the University of Warwick, visited ISET to talk about environmental state capacity in Georgia and other countries of the former Soviet Union. She presented an overview of her research, under the framework of which she is going to explore the capacity of Georgia, Russia, Ukraine, and Armenia to design, implement and enforce environmental policies.

Did you know what Georgia produces most and what the share of its production worldwide is? Wine and copper seem the obvious answers – but these would be wrong. The answer is, in fact, cryptocurrency: 15% of all Bitcoins in the world are mined in Georgia, perhaps a disproportionate figure given the country’s small size.

On Monday, October 8, during his visit to Georgia, ISET hosted Dr. David Tsirekidze, the Principal Consultant at Edgeworth Economics (Washington, DC), Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University, and an ISET graduate of 2011. He gave a presentation entitled “Success and Motivation”.

On September 13, ISET hosted Farhad Taghizaden-Sesary, Professor of Economics at Waseda University, Tokyo, and Senior Assistant to the Dean of Asian Development Bank Institute. Dr. Taghizaden-Sesary delivered a lecture entitled Green Energy Finances.

It is well-known (and, indeed, something of a staple of modern society) that physical attractiveness affects individual well-being and behavior in many different ways… but productivity in economic research would not often be considered one of them.