Georgian agriculture was more developed in Soviet times as it is today. Despite great overall technological progress almost everywhere in the last 20 years, Georgia moved backward when it comes to agriculture. In the year 1990, at the end of the Soviet Union, the number of cattle exceeded 4 million, while today it is just a little more than 1 million. In the Soviet Union, Georgia was a main producer of tea, citrus fruits, deciduous trees, and vine. According to the Rural Poverty Portal, after the collapse of the Soviet Union the output of some of these g...

In Georgia today and in Europe in the past, villages owned pastures where every shepherd and cattle-herder in the community could take his animals. Grazing on these pastures was free and unrestricted. This land, owned by all villagers jointly, is traditionally referred to as the “commons” (in the last years, the term has been extended to also refer to free-to-use internet content). The access to common land is unregulated, and consequently the villagers utilize on this resource as much as they can. Due to the heavy overuse, the common land in villages ha...

In his 1991 book “The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century”, the famous American political scientist Samuel Huntington (1927-2008) identifies three global democratization waves in the history of humankind. The first wave was the creation of the classical democracies in the United Kingdom and North America and the ongoing democratization process of the 19th century in France and other European countries. The second democratization wave refers to the time after the Second World War, when some latecomers (Germany, Italy, Spain etc.), jo...

Do development projects reach their stated objectives, such as reducing poverty, improving skills, creating jobs, etc.? This turns out to be a complicated question about project impact that a simple before-and-after measurement would not help answering. Why? The answer is also complicated, of course, but here are two points to consider: First, when a country goes through a rapid modernization process, as is arguably the case in Georgia, most development indicators improve over time regardless of specific donor interventions. Second, even if we observe a...

Evacuation is one of the most frequently used words in Georgian TV in the last two weeks, arguably due to an inflation of fibber bomb warnings. Rustavi 2, Imedi, Parliament, airport, bank offices, and schools – all were targeted by these macabre hoaxes. In the Georgian fairy tale of Liar Shepherd, the young boy lied twice that wolfs were coming. When finally wolfs were really coming, no one believed him anymore. This is one of the main risks of bomb hoaxes – they may lead to something one might call “terrorism fatigue”. Recently, I spoke with somebody wh...

Measuring economic developments is often a laborious business. Consider, for example, the Consumer Price Index (CPI). One first has to define the so called consumption basket that contains the goods and services whose prices you want to track. These goods and services have to be represented in the basket in the right proportions, reflecting the consumption patterns of an average consumer. Unfortunately, consumption habits change over time, and product characteristics change even more. A personal computer 10 years ago is obviously a very different object ...