Before answering this question, let us define what economists usually mean with ” informal employment”. There is some confusion with this term, and sometimes it is improperly used as a synonym for tax evasion or illegality. ILO defines informal employment as: employment “consisting of units engaged in the production of goods or services with the primary objective of generating employment and incomes to the persons concerned. These units typically operate at a low level of organisation, with little or no division between labour and capital as factors of p...

“Jewelry you can pawn whenever you encounter financial difficulties", we were told by a friend. In our circles of acquaintances there are quite a number of people who enjoy the services of pawnshops. The reasons range from renovating apartments, paying tuition for children, and buying new hi-fi systems for the car, to repaying the 1000 lari that the 18 year-old son had lost in gambling. According to a survey of GeoStat (which accounts for all figures provided in this article), in 2013 the annual interest rate on pawnshop loans was 54,1%. For loans denomi...

On May 2, 2014, the Georgian parliament unanimously passed the law on the elimination of any form of discrimination. The stated objective of the law is to ensure that any physical or legal entity equally benefits from all rights defined by Georgian legislation, irrespective of race, skin color, language, sex, citizenship, place of origin, birth or residence, wealth or class status, religion or belief, national, ethnic or social belonging, profession, marital or health status, disabilities, sexual orientation, gender identity, political or other considera...

The existence of a sizeable shadow (or second, informal) economy in the USSR was and is well-known. The Soviet era was characterized by a very rigid formal system with a high level of bureaucratization and inefficient planning. This resulted in many problems, both in terms of production and consumption. Soviet consumers experienced constant frustration and dissatisfaction caused by endlessly searching for goods and services they demanded, the need to queue for them without any guarantee of getting what they wanted, and the risk of having instead to accep...

Until the 1960s, Japan was an amazing place to live. One did not have to lock one’s house, car, or bicycle, as nobody was going to steal anything. Theft, burglary, and cheating were virtually non-existent in the Japanese society of those days. Imagine how much resources this saved, as Japanese did not have to employ guards, they did not have to install alarm systems, they even did not need to buy locks. Moreover, they needed less police and prisons, and Japanese firms did not have to install complex control mechanisms for making sure that employees did n...

In a 2012 article that was published on the ISET Economist Blog, Yaroslava Babych did justice to what lately has been a theme of scientific gossip and backstage talk, which I have personally often encountered among socially (albeit not exclusively) inclined economists about the alarming sex ratio at birth (SRB) statistics in Georgia and its neighboring countries. Yaroslava Babych presented numbers showing that SRB—the ratio of boys to girls in a baby population— of Georgia is topped just by China, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. Judging from the number of comme...