Georgia is a favorable investment destination, with a simple tax code consisting of six flat taxes and a total tax rate of only 16% on commercial profits that are distributed. Georgia was ranked 16th on the World Banks Ease of Doing Business for 2017 (by contrast, Switzerland is No. 31 and Norway No. 6), and No. 13 on the Bribery Risk Scale of the “Trace”, an International Transparency Rank (Switzerland is No. 16 and Norway No. 5). Georgia has signed an Association Agreement with the EU, is a member of WHO, has ratified the Energy Charter Treaty, and signed the New York Convention.

This year’s ISET’s Summer School was composed of a series of lectures, talks by prominent speakers, and debates on the subject of reforms.

Over the past 30 years, Georgia went through a remarkable roller-coaster transition from being one of the best performing USSR republics to a failed state to the top reformer on the post-Soviet space and thus demonstrating that change is possible. Georgia’s experience of fast-track development and modernization through international cooperation, radical deregulation, and trade liberalization carry important lessons learned for policymakers in other transition and developing nations.

On July 7-8, 2017 ISET hosted the 10th edition of the Workshop on the Economics of Advertising and Marketing, supported by the Labex MME-DII research project of the University of Cergy-Pontoise.

In addition to its other exchange programs, from last year ISET has actively built up a cooperative relationship with Lausanne University. A group of students and professors from the Business and Economics Faculty at Lausanne University visited ISET early this year and had a chance to take a course in Mechanism Design, taught by Motty Perry, a Senior Academic Advisor at ISET and Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick in the UK.