What do Georgian Troops Think about the Iraq War?

Recently, the Georgian Times published an article on a poll recently conducted by GORBI of Georgian Troops in Iraq. According to the article, this is the first poll conducted amongst these soldiers.

The article highlights that troops continue to have very positive feelings towards their tenure in Iraq and agree with Saakashvili sending them there. According to the poll, 89% are satisfied with the current conditions and 93% are satisfied with their training.

This data may point to the professionalization of the Georgian army. Interestingly, according to a poll done by the Military Times (no ability to rate its quality) at the end of 2007, 80% of American troops, still say they are "somewhat" or "completely" satisfied with their jobs. This is despite the fact that now more than half of troops believe that America should not have gone to war.

Georgian citizens, however, like American citizens and unlike the Georgian troops generally do not support troop involvement in Iraq and often possess cynical views of America "buying cheap Georgian cannon fodder" type.

The article, however, opens several interesting research questions.

• Why do Georgian troops have such a positive attitude towards serving in Iraq? I think there may be several unexpected answers to this question, which involve exposure to different troops (i.e. Americans and Brits) and the benefits and salaries these soldiers receive compared to what the receive back home. Or maybe, they just have the feeling that they are serving a useful purpose. Feedback welcome.
• Interestingly, the questionnaire used by GORBI was a self-completion questionnaire. Our experience is that these type of questionnaires work poorly with Georgians, as there is no tradition of filling them out. We wonder how this worked with the Georgian troops.

If the GORBI dataset was publicly available, interesting analysis could be done there.

Georgian Election | ODIHR Preliminary Report and its Percentages

So the preliminary report on yesterday's Parliamentary Elections which ODIHR has just released again notes that the count had problems.

While this, as discussed yesterday, is not a good overall indicator for how the counts went throughout the country, it raises the question whether we can at least compare this report with the one for the Presidential Election in January. Presumably, if 23% of observers managed to find a bad count in January, and 22% identify problems now, it should mean that the number has remained relatively stable. So: in terms of count, the election roughly is the same.

Right? Actually, no. First, different observers have different standards in terms of what they characterize as "bad". As the ODIHR statistician (a figure fighting for more attention internally, and fortunately making some progress) will tell you, Russian observers, for example, fill out their forms somewhat differently. Since there is no training, there's no calibration of what "bad" means, and how to distinguish that from "reasonable" or "very bad". Change the composition of the Election Observation Mission, and you may change the results. Although this is the biggest problem when comparing two very different missions (Georgia's numbers, with 22% of counts assessed as bad or very bad and Armenia's Presidential Election in February, with 16% in that category just can't be meaningfully compared), it can also affect a comparison of two elections in the same country.

A bigger challenge comes from better targeting of observers: since this is a repeat election within a relatively short time frame, ODIHR can target so-called problem districts and precincts much more accurately. More observers in these problem districts means more problems found. It is perfectly possible that a relatively stable number actually hides a marked improvement. Again, that's a sort of non-obvious selection bias.

Add another curious component: in the January election at least some teams were ordered to abandon the observation because of rough cold conditions and snowfall at some point in the night ("drive before the driver gets too tired"), and return to their hotels. This time, with better weather, the observation probably was more sticky, and more teams stayed until the very end when some of the problems become really apparent. Again, this could have some impact when comparing the numbers.

Noting these counterintuitive impacts (some small, some big) on absolute numbers shouldn't serve to dismiss the observation effort, nor the attempt to quantify. Yes, no count should be bad, and training and everything else should remain as ambitious as possible. We're noting this primarily to contribute to a sophisticated use of the data, and again to underline the need for a revised observation methodology, which ideally emphasizes more sophisticated sampling.

Diaspora Internet Presence | Switzerland and Germany

One way of tracking how organised migrants abroad are is simple -- just check the web. During a less exciting conference presentation, we browsed how the people from the Caucasus represent themselves -- checking Germany and Switzerland, since these are less likely to offer a plethora of sites. As you might have guessed, Armenia stands out with the most organised webpresence. Let's look at what they are up to.

Armenien.am is very active, with a forum, and many events, And once you see that there is a "flirt area", the Armenian-Rhenish boat party will not really surprise you.


Certainly an active community!

In Switzerland, Hayastan.ch stands out. This is a Zürich group, young, with soccer games, volleyball, singing, an Armenian Summer Camp in Tessino, and a weekly language school. Knowing Switzerland well, I couldn't help noticing some very Helvetian traits, and not just in the fondue evenings. The website symbol combines the Zurich Churchtowers with Armenian colours



And then there is another Swiss group, too: more francophone, more political, with a lobbying component, for example asking Swiss election candidates for a detailed response on Armenian issues. Surely a balancing act for politicians, since there are Turkish voter groups as well.

You find them here. And again, some peculiar components: their major support the homeland project is... solar electricity.

Last stop, Armenien.de. A neat, professional site, based in Cologne, referring to local communities around churches, structured as incorporated associations. According to that site, there are 40.000 Armenians in Germany.

This isn't even exhaustive, just some snapshots. Next post: Georgian groups. They certainly are less visible. A Google search for "Zentralrat der Georgier" (roughly: "association of Georgians") returns:


No such Georgian hits! We are right back with the Armenian Central Council in Germany. It appears that in migration, the two cultures take very different directions in the level of their organization.

Ideally we'd like to measure that. Any creative suggestions how? (Number of mobile entries in migrants' mobile phones? Internet/Skype usage?)

Parliamentary Elections in Georgia | ODIHR Observation

With today's elections in Georgia, various themes come to mind. Certainly, elections have come a long way: by now, the Georgian government employs a series of highly qualified consultants, including Greenberg Quinlan Rosner of Clinton-fame, plus a Brussels-based PR firm, as well as working with experienced teams from the Baltics. This, then, is no longer the game of the 1990s, or 2003. Election observers know that they in turn will be observed, and maybe that's how it should be.

Note, also, the use of the Internet: so the United National Movement today is employing 150 minibuses to ferry voters around. And: they decided to put the number plates of these buses online. That doesn't make the move more popular with the opposition, but it's no longer the early-morning hush-hush thing of the past.


We're also currently working on a short paper arguing that OSCE's classical method of election observation needs to be overhauled. ODIHR, as OSCE's election observation arm is called, has an approach that has the feel of an undergraduate research project, and there is fairly little systemic thinking on how to do an observation well. While observers are briefed (often in tedious detail), there is no applied training on the minutiae of election observation. While there are legal, media, gender, minority analysts, CEC liaison, and security people there is no training officer.

In a good mission, the Long Term Observers will actually compensate for the institutional shortcomings. With bad LTOs (and having been on a fair number myself, it's noticeable how some dunderheads get recycled from mission to mission) it can be a farcical exercise.

Ultimately, research methods really matter: ODIHR (as OSCE's election observation arm is called) makes assertions about empirically verifiable facts, and this is precisely where social science methodology has come a long way.

Take this example from OSCE's Final Report on the Georgian Presidential Elections
Now, given that there were so many election observers out there (495 observers, that means almost 250 teams) a casual reader may assume that this is broadly representative: the count will have been bad in roughly 23% of stations throughout the country, right? Even if you do not draw this conclusion, test it out on friends or colleagues, and this is the assumption many will walk away with.

Now, as it ends up, that assumption may very well be mistaken. A team of election observers typically is visiting up to 10 polling stations on their observation day. They normally are instructed to pick a polling station in which they think "things will be bad" (politicized/ incompetent chairperson, some irregularities such as irreconcilable numbers during the day). As a result, there will be tremendous selection bias.

In other words, 23% of observers, untrained but looking hard, managed to find precincts in which counts were bad or very bad. Unfortunately, that number says little about what the percentage of precincts in the country is in which the count really was bad. It could be half that number, or even less (or more, given the lack of observer training!). An easy mistake to make, and just one example of what would need to be fixed in the reporting.

Time for ODIHR to undergo a rigorous external evaluation.

Creative Commons for the Caucasus! | A real opportunity

Many readers will already be aware of the concept of Creative Commons. The basic idea is to facilitate collaboration, interaction and people adding value to each other's online work. Creative Commons provides licenses for sharing easily, without giving up some of the author's basic rights. A great exposition of this entire concept is given by the founder of the entire idea, Lawrence Lessig, in an engaging TED talk (you didn't think that intellectual property rights could be that entertaining, did you?). See below.

Now that larger idea is extremely important in the South Caucasus as well. There is a lack of ideas, there's a lack of great materials for people to use, to teach, to read, to share, especially in the local languages. And conversely, there's little respect for authorship, and for the people that have created valuable content.

Introducing Creative Commons in the South Caucasus could be one step to alleviate this: not just by providing the licenses along the "build it and they'll come" expectation, but using the very process to advocate ideas of online interaction and sharing, and recreation.

And: this is precisely what Eurasia Partnership Foundation is about to do. They invite applications until the end of the month, hoping that some qualified groups will apply to port the licenses, and to popularize the concept. Hopefully, this will help to start the debate.

So for anyone interested in the web, or in Intellectual Property issues this really is a unique opportunity. Find a gang of like-minded people, apply, and get paid to popularize what you care about. Check the website of Eurasia Partnership Foundation for more detail. (The project is running in all the three countries, but I'm just linking the Georgian site.)

Here is the talk:

Caucasus Migration | US Immigration Services Annual Report for 2007

The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) recently released its annual report for the fiscal year 2007 on immigrant and nonimmigrant visas issued by the US Foreign Service posts worldwide. The report also includes data for US visas issued under various categories for the years 2003-2007.

The report shows a general increase in the numbers of both US immigrant as well as non immigrant visas issued worldwide. Thus, from 2003-2007 the number of immigrant visas issued worldwide has increased by around 16% (from 364,768 in 2003 to 434,374 in 2007) and non-immigrant visas by 30.5% (from 4,481,632 in 2003 to 6,444,285 in 2007).

The picture is a bit different across the South Caucasus. Among the three South Caucasus countries Armenia has the highest number of US immigrant visas granted annually. Moreover, from 2003-2007 this number has increased by 35% (from 689 in 2003 to 1062 in 2007), reaching its peak in 2007. Azerbaijan, on the other hand, has the lowest and more or less consistent level of US immigrant visas granted every year, varying between 230 and 294.

According to the report all three South Caucasus countries are considered a source of immigrant orphans, with Armenia leading the chart. But ultimately, numbers are comparatively low: 4 in Georgia, 5 in Azerbaijan and 32 in Armenia. Curiously, 2003 saw many orphan adoptions: 128 in Georgia, 62 in Azerbaijan in and 43 in Armenia.

If you want to see the full report, check it out here.

Subjective Well-Being in South Caucasus

How do people in the South Caucasus assess their well-being? What specific factors influence subjective well-being (i.e. self-rating of well-being) in these countries? How similar are these factors across the three countries, and are there significant differences with other transitional societies?

Elvin Afandi (2007 Fellow, CRRC-Azerbaijan), examined these issues using data from CRRC's Data Initiative survey for the year 2006. DI's "How would you describe the current economic condition of your household?" question allowed assessing subjective well-being of respondents who had to choose from "very poor", "poor", "fair", "good" and "very good".

Overall in the region, responses were distributed almost equally between poor/very poor (47% of respondents) and fair (48% of respondents). Cross-country comparison, however, revealed that subjective well-being in Armenia was more positive with more respondents identifying their economic conditions as fair, good and very good and less people identifying their economic conditions as poor and very poor than in other countries of the region.

Elvin's study suggests that impact of consumption poverty, unemployment, and inefficiency of social protection system on subjective well-being is much stronger in South Caucasus than in other middle-income transitional countries such as Ukraine or Russia. This is explained by economic recession in South Caucasus being more prolonged and more dramatic than in other middle-income transitional countries.

Some correlations are similar across the region. For example, being divorced, separated, widowed, being unemployed, and working in agriculture correlates with low rate of subjective well-being. Elvin Afandi suggests paying special attention to the fact that low subjective well-being is strongly associated with having negative perception of the past and future welfare. This may imply low upward mobility and chronic poverty.

Some variables, however, are more significant in some countries than in others. For example, being migrant in Armenia and Georgia has more impact on subjective well-being than in Azerbaijan. Interestingly, the study finds no effect of ethnicity on subjective well-being. It means that low subjective well-being is related not to ethnicity but rather to the fact that person migrated from another place.

Living in urban and rural places is more significantly correlated with subjective well-being in Azerbaijan and Georgia than in Armenia. It might mean that more dramatic urban-rural gap exists in these countries compared to Armenia.

Interest in politics positively correlates with the increase in subjective well-being. Correlation between withdrawal from discussing politics and low subjective well-being is significant in Azerbaijan and not significant either in Georgia or in Armenia. This might suggest higher risks of social exclusion of the poor in Azerbaijan.

Contact CRRC if you want to get in touch with the Elvin Affandi.

Diversity Polling on the Caucasus | Ask500

Sometimes it's worth clicking on those Gmail links. "Ask 500" is a website in beta, the web version of a straw poll. Polling? Surveys? Obviously I wanted to know more. To say it up front: it's about as unrepresentative as you can get, since it assembles those that suffer from terminal curiosity.

Playing around with it and discovering that so far this still is a small community, I posted a question on people's feelings about the Caucasus. I wanted to know whether people have positive associations (mythical, attractive), or rather negative ones (messy, dangerous, uncomfortable). And then providing some options in between. I also wanted to see whether this question will go anywhere, or whether tabloid interests will prevail.

It certainly is an attractive interface for seeing where the votes are:


Also, the comments function is particularly useful, a sort of focus group of the electronically vociferous.

Ask500 could become incredibly powerful in doing a quick review of an idea, checking it for mistakes. Put more succinctly, where a diversity of viewpoints is more important than representativeness, this approach could be a BIG THING (maybe not THE, but certainly A). It's interesting to see how the founders explicitly invoke Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds as a starting point for their work.

What never ceases to amaze me is how technology DOES flatten the world. An instrument can still be under development in the US, and as long as you have an Internet connection, you already can take part. (Obviously, turning electronic into economic opportunity to alleviate poverty is a very different challenge. Unless you are a programmer.)

In the meantime, check Ask500 to see how responses to the Caucasus develop while the poll is open. Note that the Vote button is quite small: top right.

Exit Polls | Take Two

Readers may recall that we voiced some concern with regards to exit polls. Here is a fascinating account, first-hand, by a reputed pollster having what they describe as an "Adventure in Baku". It is a salutary tale, and again shows that exit polls are not the quick fix they often are believed to be -- even when organisations such as Mitofsky International, bringing extraordinary experience get involved. As the authors conclude:

"One should never go through an experience like this without taking away something for the future. The number one lesson here is that public polling is difficult to do for organizations other than the media and for organizations that have a long history of publication of survey results, regardless of the direction of the findings. This criterion is met in the United States by foundations that sponsor polls, many government agencies, and private companies. However, if one chooses to work, as we did, for organizations with no known record for open availability of the survey findings, caveat emptor."

Well, OK. And who outside the US (and in a transition context) meets these criteria? At a very minimum, the old virtues of total transparency are critical for getting it right. But even then, huge challenges remain that cast serious doubts on the accuracy of any such enterprise, especially in a really competitive environment. Who in their right mind would have serious confidence in nuanced district level results, given the extensive problems described?

Highly recommended reading (it's entertaining, too), you find the article here.

Georgian Party Archive: extraordinary Soviet History

Quite some time ago, Georgia has opened up the party archive of the Soviet period to researchers. This is a pretty unique resource for researchers. Georgia deserves particular praise for making that history accessible. Few countries of the CIS have made this important step.

Yesterday, the relevant working group launched their first Archival Bulletin, in Georgian and English. The working group consists of some employees of the Archive Department of the Ministry of Interior, as well as some engaged enthusiasts that dedicate much of their spare time to making historical materials accessible.


The launch in the well-done Museum of the Soviet Occupation was attended by some historians, foreign scholars and representatives of the Ministry of Interior, including Minister Vano Merabishvili.

Sure, there are various challenges in Georgia, and lustration remains a contentious topic. But releasing this material marks an extraordinary achievement. Many topics could be of interest. How, for example, did officials look at de-Stalinization? How do documents reflect the stagnation in later periods of the Soviet Union? And, countless tidbits: what do the archives show about various international visitors, such as Fitzroy McLean or John Steinbeck?

Ideally, let many people know about this resource. Some background on the Georgian Freedom of Information is here, and here is the link to the actual archive (Georgian only, so far). We will keep you updated.

Book Review: Georgia Diary: A Chronicle of War and Political Chaos in the Post-Soviet Caucasus | Thomas Goltz

This reviewer is not the first to review Goltz’s Georgia Diary: A Chronicle of War and Political Chaos in the Post-Soviet Caucasus. Most notably the Wall Street Journal lauded the book and the hardcover published by M.E Sharpe gathers teasers from a wide variety of noteworthy folks on the back cover.

However, for those new to Goltz, Georgia Diary forms the third part of a trilogy of books about the Post-Soviet Caucasus, the first two covering the bad old times in the 1990s in Chechnya and Azerbaijan. This last addition to the trilogy differs from the other two in that it is written long after the events at the heart of the book took place. In that sense, it will not be quoted in the same way in academic circles as Goltz’s earlier books were. Though some take issue with the sometimes anecdotal style of Goltz’s accounts, his work is widely cited and he often speaks to academic audiences on the topic of Azerbaijan.

Though Georgia Diary, may be quoted by fewer academics, Goltz attempts to be much more academic than he was Azerbaijan Diary. But the academic part of the book is not the book’s strongest and seems to pale in comparison to Tony Anderson’s Bread and Ashes, where the academic background makes Anderson’s trek through the high Georgian Caucasus all the more delightful.

Nevertheless, Goltz’s unforgettable fast-paced writing returns when he recounts time spent in Sukhumi before and during and after the withdrawal of Georgian troops from Abkhazia. This is Goltz at his best and his work serves to highlight for many the multiple angles of the Georgian civil war and the difficulty in writing about it clearly or classifying well from an academic perspective what exactly was going on.

For instance, the fact the supporters of the first Georgian President Gamsakhurdia were based out of Sukhumi created a complexity for those, under the banner of Eduard Shevardanadze, who were allied against Gamsakhurdia and in control of the Georgian military. While Abkhaz aligned forces were attacking Sukhumi, there was still a battle for territory in Western Georgia going on between those allied with Gamsakhurdia and those with Shevardnadze. As Goltz regales, these sides were known as the Position and the Opposition, however, which was the Position and which was Opposition appears to depend on what side you were on, and caused never ending confusion to outsiders trying to figure out what the heck was going on in a land so few in the West had ever heard of.

To someone familiar with Georgia, some of the mistakes slightly grate. The Russian use of the ploshchad instead of the Georgian moedani when Goltz claims to be speaking Georgian, the referral to Mingrelian as a dialect of Georgian rather than a separate language, or the mistranscription of the Georgian name Avtandil as Artvandil highlight Goltz’s self-proclaimed lack of familiarity with Georgia.

Nevertheless, all in all, Goltz adds yet another readable volume, to what is now his trilogy on the Caucasus.

This post is also published in the Georgian Times.

Migration in Georgia: Launching the "Development on the Move" Project

ISET and CRRC today launched the Development on the Move (DOTM) Project. The aim of this project is to map how migration impacts development in multiple dimensions. DOTM is funded by the Global Development Network, and coordinated by the Institute for Public Policy Research in London. 250 proposals from throughout the world competed to participate in this project, and we were extremely happy to be selected as one of the six winning teams.

Various stakeholders from the Georgian Government including National Bank, international organizations (OSCE, ILO, IOM), embassies, NGOs and leading Georgian researchers participated. Danny Sriskandarajah represented IPPR.


After introducing the project to the audience, a very focused debate followed, highlighting various migration impacts. These include remittance impacts on labor and real estate markets, changing gender roles in families, drug abuse in the absence of social control, de-skilling through low-level exploitative employment abroad, as well as various potential positive impacts, such as attitudinal change, language learning, and exposure to specialized education. (More exhaustive minutes will be available on request.)

A second component was a review of the existing policy gaps. There continues to be a mismatch between EU and local expectations. Citizenship, taxation and custom laws may discourage return migration. Embassies do not really serve as points of contact, but often are avoided, especially by undocumented migrants. Coordination of agencies, systematic gathering of quality data, and data sharing were also highlighted as particular issues.

We encourage anyone interested in migration to get in touch with us if they want to find out more about this project. We're planning a specialized mailing list, and migration-specific website for Georgia will be launched in the next few weeks by the Danish Refugee Council. More details about the international projects are available here.

Ironies of Rural Development Intervention

A story told by a researcher recently returned from Afghanistan, working on a development program. Here he is asking people in a village:
"How often do you clean out your irrigation channel?"
"Every time the NGO pays us."
"Well, when did they last pay you?"
"Two years ago."
"How often did you clean the irrigation channel before the NGO arrived to work in the region?"
"Every year."
Apocryphal as the story may be, it still is a wonderful illustration of how interventions can change the local calculus, substituting for local effort and thereby leading to bizarre, unanticipated distortions. That theme is probably relevant to many rural development programs across the region. If you have any similar stories, let us know.

Counting People Makes them Count | Richard Rose

Richard Rose, a renowned specialists in the field of Social Capital, is currently visiting Georgia to deliver trainings at CRRC. He offered a public lecture setting out the case for conducting surveys, and entitled "Counting People Helps Make People Count". Not that we needed convincing, but we still enjoyed the way the argument was set out.

As Rose argued, surveys give a direct voice to people, show how they are living, what they are thinking, and identifies both what the problems are and who has them. He contrasted this bottom -up approach with a top-down approach to policy, and suggested that it has a special place between journalism, which tells one-off stories and ethnography or anthropology, which tell complex stories that become difficult to generalize. Data, in other words, are the plural of anecdotes. A concrete example he offered was a survey conducted in Latvia, designed to focus on poverty among female pensioners. As survey results showed, this was a relatively minor problem, compared to child poverty -- an insight that can help to direct scarce resources.

However, there also can be a catch, when data is turned into a league table, since only one can ever be on top. All others can see themselves as losers, relatively speaking. Yet this realization does not need to invoke the particularism of Johann Gottfried Herder, who had argued that basically all comparison is disastrous. Instead, making progress is the relevant category. As Rose put it: "if you talk about league tables, the conversation is pessimistic. If you talk about making progress, you can focus on making changes". Little happiness lies in comparing oneself to Sweden, but tracking progress in overcoming destitution charts a concrete path to where one wants to go.

Packaged into the talk were many engaging tidbits: admonishments that typical poverty data is one-dimensional ("relative poverty as a curse of Fabian Socialism"); the observation that throughout the former socialist bloc answers to "do you feel freer than before?" remain quite sticky, in that the positive sea change is not forgotten; the curious observation that 58% of Turkish population appears worried about Christian missionaries; and that Russia after the collapse for a long time lacked the "why we are here" speech, something that in post-1945 Germany was easier to deliver. His curriculum vitae lists many of his relevant publications.

The overall outlook was quite optimistic, in that he saw extensive progress. Professor Rose is currently writing a book about Transition and After, which will reflect many of these themes. Currently he is offering a training course on designing Social Capital questionnaires. He also urged us to publish more results from our Data Initiative, which we will be doing over the next few weeks.

Tourism: Structure and Cost-sharing

A slightly specialized topic: what's the cost of tourism? Often suggested as a way of developing parts of the South Caucasus, especially Georgia, quickly, it's interesting to take a quick look, since in tourism many factors interact: business, environment, architecture, urban planning, societal habits, local versus national government, local and foreign expectations, and the challenge of reconciling all of those.

Gudauri, Georgia's main ski resort is an interesting example. It currently is being privatized again, after a previous privatization attempt did not succeed when the investor walked away after a few months, for a range of reasons, including local (they found it difficult to get all the land they needed to consolidate their holdings) and legal (apparently they were sued in a foreign court for a debt incurred by the Shevardnadze government, under an obscure clause).


In Gudauri the lifts are bundled together with the main Sport Hotel, as a single entity, a curious late 80s Austrian-Soviet venture. The bundling creates various problems: investments into the lifts may benefit all hotels and guest houses by bringing more visitors, but investment has to be undertaken by a single institution. The other hotels effectively are free riders.

This also raises issues at the end of season: now the lifts are beginning to run at a loss, with daily electricity costs about 600 GEL, and personnel costs of about 400 GEL, plus fuel costs for grading the pistes, starting anywhere at 300 GEL per day, depending on the weather. At a price per pass of 25 GEL, more than 60 skiers are needed in the resort, and as last weekend showed, it's barely more than three dozen at this time of year.

But: at this time of year, lifts start at nine o'clock (as opposed to ten, earlier in the season) and many people prefer to ski early before it gets too slushy, so that people now are even more likely to stay over, rather than drive up from Tbilisi. A few guest houses are actually full, and thriving. Of course, that money would dry up once the season is over, so the skiing is primarily kept to feed the guesthouses. Yet in the current structure, the lift operator still incurs a loss.

Generally, quality of service has seen a huge improvement in the last year, and the main variable is competent new management. But a lot of things still need to fall into place, and in the upcoming privatization one idea is to separate the lifts out, which may even be an option since this year for the first time the llifts have been making a profit.

In a way, the resort mirrors many of the intervowen challenges that need to be met (and who to meet them: national government? Local?), and in which growth typically throws up the next problem, such as the supply of drinking water to all the new buildings.

Armenia and Azerbaijan’s Performance | Millennium Challenge Corporation’s Meta-Index

A previous blog entry on Millennium Challenge Corporation’s Meta-Index, as you may recall, presented Georgia’s performance. For those who do not know, Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) uses data from the research of various organizations such as the IFC, the World Bank Institute, UNESCO, Freedom House and others. Millennium Challenge Corporation recently released an assessment through its annual scorecard, which has three main policy categories: Ruling Justly, Investing in People, and Economic Freedom.

Unlike Georgia, were most of the trends are positive, trends in Armenia and Azerbaijan are not very consistent. Armenia has problems, especially in the Ruling Justly categories: the Political Rights, Civil Liberties and the Voice and Accountability are all in decline. The only two Armenian trends, which are currently improving, are the Primary Education Expenditures (UNESCO/National Sources) from the Investing in People category and the Regulatory Quality (World Bank Institute) from the Economic Freedom section.

Armenia

As for Azerbaijan, the news, according to the scorecard, unfortunately is pretty bleak. Most indicators are below the median, and some trends are declining further: among them, the Voice and Accountability trend, which was already quite low; the Inflation trend has increased, although, it looks as if that trend had been stopped in 2006. The Business Start-Up (IFC) and the Fiscal Policy (National Sources) are the only ones with a consistent increase each year.

Azerbaijan

For more info, click here. As always your comments welcome.

Focus Groups | some basic local lessons

We have recently conducted 20 focus groups across Georgia. (More on the content later.)

Here are some basic tips and tricks we found useful.

• Rewards: 15 GEL phone cards; that seems just about right: not overpaying, but still attractive.
• Recruitment: on the street, at sampling points a couple of days in advance; we get definitive agreement from 20 people, write down their phone number and address, and then send out a taxi to pick up the respondent before the event; we did NOT screen for articulacy and ended up with a few laconic focus group members, but never more than one or two per group. In future, we may ask a quick AND complex question (a typical screen is something like"if you could only pick one skill, which skill would you like to have, playing an instrument or a team sport? And tell us why?"), to select even better.
  
• Timing: amazingly, we started several of the focus groups EARLY since everyone was there already; so we turned the reserve away, with the 15 GEL phone card as a reward for showing up. Typically, groups ran 2 hours, and that worked fine.
  
• Numbers: we had 10 people per group, which was OK considering that we had some less outspoken participants; otherwise, it would have been just a bit too much; small things matter: narrow tables ended up isolating participants at the end.
  
• Discussion Guide: on that, we spent a lot of time. We think we got that right.
• Mirrors: nice to have, of course, but we opted for a camera, with a live feed (see photo) into the next room; we briefly thought about purchasing the cameras, but then decided the wiser course was to hire a professional local journalism organisation.
• Minority areas: for Kvemo Kartli and Samtske-Javakheti, we brought in facilitators from Azerbaijan and Armenia. Many people told us that you couldn't use Baku Azerbaijani language in Marneuli, but it turns out that our Baku-based facilitator got along very well (although some people seemed shy of her 'high' language, and responded in Russian); maybe this would change in rural areas, but in Marneuli city, Azerbaijani language is not an issue.
  
• We always had a facilitator and a note-taker, even if the latter is a bit of a luxury since we had full transcripts, it serves a good support function.

We hope others doing research will find some of this helpful. Any suggestions for good screening questions?

Brookings Index of Regime Weakness | State Rebuilding or State Collapse in the Caucasus | The Annals of Data

Yet another index was released recently -- Brookings Index of State Weakness in the Developing World. One professor of mine in graduate school, who was a veteran hot spot worker, related that all of the conflict professionals keep their eye on this map to see where they are going next. In this year's version of the index, however, it's where they already are: Somalia, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Iraq top the list.

But how do the Caucasus fit in? A bit surprising, Azerbaijan (ranked 80th out of 141) is considered the weakest regime in the Caucasus. Indeed, the Azerbaijani government has accused Western governments of ranking Azerbaijan as worst on purpose.

So what's behind the Azerbaijani rating? Much of this is because of Azerbaijan's bottom quintile rating for the "incidence of coups" as well as it's relatively low scores (second lowest quintile) on all but one variable in the political basket। Such data gels with the findings from the Bertelsmann Transformation Index, which we recently wrote about. But what about the political coups? As it turns out, it is the number of political coups since 1992 as rated by the Economist Intelligence Unit and something call Archigos 2.8. But, why has Azerbaijan had more coups than Georgia? Deeper into the halls of data we go.

Archigos is a dataset collected by Professor Hein Goemans of the University of Rochester, which contains a massive dataset on "the date and manner of entry and exit of over 3,000 leaders 1875 - 2004 as well as their gender, birth- and death-date, previous times in office and their post-exit fate." So, what does this database have to say about coups in Azerbaijan? And why is Azerbaijan's coup rating so much higher than Georgia's, which arguably has had more coups of a sort?

Azerbaijan's higher coup incidence hangs on definitions. According to the rules laid down by Professor Goemans, as long as political succession happens according to the laws of the country, even if a leader is removed extralegally, it is not considered a coup. Therefore, when Shevardnadze was toppled in 2003, it was not a coup according to the database because Nino Burjanadze became interim president, as stipulated by the constitution.

Hence, under Archigos' definition Armenia has had no coups since 1992 and Georgia has only had one -- when Jaba Ioseliani took over the reins of power from Zviad Gamsakhurdia. Azerbaijan, on the other hand, has had two coups since 1992, according to the dataset: the ascension to the presidency of Isa Gambarov (now Gambar) and Əbülfəz Elçibəy (often written as Abülfaz Elçibay). Heydar Aliyev's ascension is not considered to be a coup by the dataset.

Comments on these categorizations of coups in the Caucasus most welcome!

Philanthropy in Georgia

Corporate Social Responsibility, a fashionable issue, is becoming a topic in the South Caucasus as well. CRRC research fellow, Giorgi Meladze, explored Georgian corporations’ generosity in his research undertaken in 2006.

According to official information received from the tax department, 210 companies have officially claimed philanthropic activities in Georgia. The amount spent on charity varied from 50 GEL to 100,000 GEL. Unfortunately of those 210 companies, only 79 companies responded to Meladze’s questionnaire, which probably is somewhat less representative than one would wish.

According to official data, banks and construction and pharmaceutical companies most actively participated in philanthropy, spending around 7,565,994 GEL on charity in 2005-2006. Almost half of this money was spent on monument conservation, cultural and sport activities and health projects. The majority of the surveyed companies do not have a clear strategy and spend money on charity spontaneously. Moreover, the companies do not require financial reporting on their activities. The surveyed organization named ineffective legislation as one of the biggest challenges to philanthropy. This hindered donors from spending more funds on charity. According to the Georgian legislation, only legal persons are eligible for receiving tax subsidies, and government recognizes only money donations as charity.

According to the findings, the most popular directions in philanthropy are:

• aid to orphanages and shelters for elderly people
• help to religious intuitions
• support to sport organizations (NGOs)

Even though companies might finance NGOs working in a similar field, few companies were interested in helping non-governmental organizations despite the fact that some large companies cooperate with them and use their services. [For further information on corporate social responsibility you can visi thet Eurasia Partnership Foundation website.]

We hope the government integrates Meladze’s recommendations into upcoming legislative amendments. For more info, you can directly contact the author of the research through our office.

PISA in Azerbaijan | Take 2 | great maths scores

In a previous post we wrote about the PISA scores of 15-year olds in Azerbaijan. As you may recall, PISA is an international test of competency, primarily focusing on reading, mathematics and science. Azerbaijan deserves particular praise for participating in this challenging international exercise: the results in science were not altogether flattering, but it's better to take part than to stand aside, and it can only be hoped that Georgia and Armenia will also be taking part soon.

At the time of posting, we received some comments that the overall performance was not so bad. Azerbaijani math scores, it was pointed out, were much better. Time, therefore, for another look. Indeed, Azerbaijan performs much better at mathematics. (If you want to see what is being tested, check the PISA sample questions.)

Azerbaijan does better than, say, Argentina, Bulgaria, Mexico, Montenegro, and even Turkey. Conversely, the Baltic states and Russia do better than Azerbaijan. For example, Russia has about 15% reaching Level 4 in Mathematics, and about 6% reaching Level 5 (on a scale from 0 to 6, with 6 denoting highest). Azerbaijan by comparison only has about 7% reaching Level 4 in mathematics, and less than 1% getting to Level 5.

Still, altogether this is highly encouraging news. However, there is one item that is a little hard to explain, and if anyone has any ideas, let us know: according to this OECD data, Azerbaijan has the best basic mathematics training of all participating countries. Only 0.2% do NOT manage to reach the Level 1, which is quite exceptional. In Liechtenstein, for example, a wholesome 4% don't make it to Level 1, in Romania 24%, in Bulgaria nearly 30%, in Brazil even nearly 50%. So with 0.2%, what exactly happened in Azerbaijan? Is it really a case of no-child-left-behind? But what, then, should Switzerland (4.6%), Japan (4%) or Denmark (3.6%) learn from Azerbaijan?

Does anybody know? Did the bad students just not turn up for the test?