A $150-million-plus Chinese real estate and tourism deal that is slated for a suburb of Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi, is creating a quandary for many Georgians. The project is feeding a long-standing desire for foreign investment, but it is also stoking wariness about foreign influence.
Where should the line be drawn between a government official’s personal wealth and his or her public responsibilities? Amidst promises to use his own cash to stimulate business investment, compensate storm victims and prop up the state budget, billionaire Georgian Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili is making any distinction ever blurrier.
A competitive parliamentary election race is taking shape in Georgia. As a result, the political process in the South Caucasus nation is diversifying – getting out of the capital and into the countryside.
Always on the lookout for economic opportunity, officials in Georgia are trying to encourage members of the country’s far-flung Diaspora to organize, and bring their skills and cash back home.
Twenty-year-old Tbilisi supermarket clerk Kristina works seven days a week, eight hours a day, making a pre-tax monthly salary of about $121 (200 laris). She’s an hourly worker, but since late December she has not been paid. Still, she keeps working: in an economy where jobs are scarce, it’s not like she has a lot of options.
Gambling spots sometimes seem as commonplace as khachapuri bakeries in Georgia’s capital Tbilisi. So it’s no surprise that amid the strong growth of the Internet, a rapidly increasing number of Georgians have a fever for online betting.
In the United States, the embattled postal service is resorting to drastic cost-cutting and sell-offs to stay solvent. In the Republic of Georgia, the post office is taking a different route to fiscal soundness – running the lottery.
Nine days ago in Georgia’s Black Sea region of Achara, President Mikheil Saakashvili unveiled the glitzy, “seven-star” seaside resort of Anaklia -- a complex intended as a response to Russia’s military presence in breakaway Abkhazia.
