More than three decades ago economists famously concluded that tax compliance is rather irrational behavior. Literature, across a wide range of disciplines, has since been overflowing with analysis as to why we see so much tax compliance in the modern world. The academic literature is concerned with why people pay so much tax or why so many people pay taxes, therefore policy-makers can gain an understanding of the underlying mechanisms, which thus allows them to design appropriate policy actions to boost revenue efforts.

On November 19, ISET was visited by Mr. Alan Fuchs of the World Bank Group, whose presentation, 'Taxing Tobacco in Georgia: The welfare and distributional gains of quitting smoking’, delved into the welfare and distributional impact of increasing taxes on tobacco in Georgia.

November 15-16 witnessed the largest and most high-profile event of ISET’s year: the first international conference on gender economics entitled ‘Removing Obstacles to Gender Equality and Women’s Economic Empowerment’. The two-day event, hosted by ISET and the FREE Network (the Forum for Research On Eastern Europe and Emerging Economies), attracted academics from 14 countries, including Australia, India, Canada, the countries of the South Caucasus, Eastern and Western Europe.

On May 3, the US-based World Resource Initiative (WRI) published ‘How to Enable Electric Bus Adoption In Cities Worldwide’, which examines the process of adopting e-buses in sixteen case study cities. Tbilisi City Hall took the first couple of steps necessary to introduce the first electric bus in 2018 and is expected to scale up the number to 200 from 2020.

The cost of cooking one standard Imeretian khachapuri in May 2019 averaged 3.24 GEL, which is approximately 2.4% higher compared to May 2018 (year-on-year), and 6.4% lower compared to the previous month (April 2019).