ISET students visiting Stockholm have returned to Georgia after spending a week in Sweden as guests of the Stockholm School of Economics. While the students attended several lectures at a number of different universities, their time was not limited to studying alongside their Swedish counterparts: instead of a solely academic trip, the students were also taken to visit the Swedish Central Bank and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Sweden, which allowed them to compare the inner workings of one of Europe’s leading economies with their own country.

On November 20, the study “Mapping of Emerging and Potential Clusters in Georgia” carried out by the ISET Policy Institute in cooperation with local and international partners was presented at the stakeholder forum ‘Promoting a strong and competitive business in Georgia’ organized by the EU and the four UN agencies – UNDP, FAO, UNIDO, and IOM, under their joint effort for the strong and competitive private sector in Georgia.

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 the 13th of November, ISET was visited by Joey Cherdarchuk of Darkhorse Analytics, a Canadian company specializing in data science and information design. The firm is dedicated to helping organizations and individuals present their data in a clear and understandable way; in an often humorous and highly informative workshop, Mr. Cherdarchuk demonstrated how failures in data presentation can be misleading (wilfully or otherwise) and inaccurate.