Small changes in corruption rates in the Caucasus

On October 26 Transparency International released the results of the 2010 Corruption Perception Index (CPI). The CPI is a measure of domestic, public sector corruption in 178 countries, rating them on a scale from 10 (very clean) to 0 (highly corrupt). Nearly three quarters of the countries in the index score below five and the South Caucasus countries are no exceptions.

Georgia ranks best in the South Caucasus on place 68 with the score 3.8, an insignificant change from 2009 (place 66 with a score of 4.1). Georgia’s 2010 score is comparable to those of Italy, Brazil and Cuba. Out of all post-Soviet countries, only the Baltic States rank better. Still, it is far from the top-ranked countries with scores of more than 9.

Also Armenia maintains a stable ranking in the CPI, moving from place 120 in 2009 to 123 and a score of 2.6 in 2010, sharing place with Madagascar, Niger and Eritrea.

Looking at Azerbaijan’s ranking, it moved from place 143 in 2009 to place 134 in 2010. It does, however, not indicate a significant decrease in corruption as the scores only improved from 2.3 to 2.4. It rather shows that more countries in the index performed worse this year than in 2009. The Azerbaijani scores are comparable to those of Ukraine, Sierra Leone, Bangladesh and Honduras. Of the post-Soviet republics, Russia, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan did worse than Azerbaijan.

Denmark	9.3
New Zealand	9.3
Estonia	6.5
Italy	3.9
Georgia	3.8
Brazil	3.7
Cuba	3.7
Eritrea	2.6
Madagascar	2.6
Niger	2.6
Armenia	2.6
Uganda	2.5
Azerbaijan	2.4
Bangladesh	2.4
Sierra Leone	2.4
Russia	2.1
Uzbekistan	1.6
Somalia	1.1

Scores for selected countries according to the 2010 CPI.

You can access the full CPI report here. To learn more about perceptions and attitudes toward corruption in Armenia, visit the CRRC Armenia website to get free access to the USAID Mobilizing Action Against Corruption (MAAC) survey dataset and reports. You will also find several posts on corruption in the South Caucasus here on the blog.

Report release - Life on the boundary line: the future of security in Shida Kartli

Saferworld has released a report this month titled Life on the boundary line: the future of security in Shida Kartli. The report is based on the qualitative and quantitative research conducted by CRRC, and aims to assess the security needs of the communities living along the administrative boundary line (ABL) between Shida Kartli and South Ossetia/the Tskhinvali region in Georgia. Our former fellow Malte Viefhus co-wrote it with David Wood, from Saferworld. The study identifies the different security-related needs of communities living along the ABL, as well as potential future trends in security and community stability. The findings are especially relevant as the crisis response comes to an end, and offers some lessons learned for how national and international actors can be most effective in responding to the security needs of conflict-affected communities in the future.

Getting Your Message Through in a Sea of Information

How can we communicate information in an attractive and compelling way? How can we present complex data in a way that is easy to understand? How can we increase the impact of campaigns and projects most effectively?

The answer is information design! By illustrating information visually we can better target our constituencies and persuasively present facts and ideas in a clear and convincing way. It sounds great, you may say, but actually, what is information design? Information design is all about using pictures, symbols, colors and words to communicate ideas, messages and information. The Tactical Technology Collective sums it up as “Information design brings form and structure to information. Information design is about making data clear, compelling and convincing”. Unfortunately, information design is a topic that so far has received little attention in Georgia, and the available literature is minimal. Over the past month, CRRC has taken several steps to start changing this. First, CRRC made the booklet Visualizing Information for Advocacy: An Introduction to Information Design, produced by Tactical Technology Collective and sponsored by the Open Society Institute, available in Georgian. Besides examples of good designs, the booklet gives resources of free online tools that can help groups or individuals with limited budgets develop their information design skills.

On October 12, 2010, CRRC organized a presentation on information design with participants from universities and local as well as international NGOs. The presentation focused on the different ways we can use information design and how to start exploring the benefits of using information design in our everyday work.

CRRC has also created the Google Group called Information Design. The purpose of this group is to exchange good--and not so good--examples of information design, and to discuss and ask questions about information design in general.

To get a hard copy of the booklet Visualizing Information for Advocacy: An Introduction to Information Design (Georgian or English) and to sign up for the Google Group, send an e-mail to therese.svensson+design@crrccenters.org.

Junior Research Fellowship 2011 announced! The Chance of a Lifetime

The Best and Hardest Thing You Will Ever Do

Are you a research-minded university graduate who wants to gain an important skill set that is absent in Georgia? Do you want to work hard and open the door for international opportunities? If so, then this is for you!

What you will gain

• Ability to analyze complex issues quickly and comprehensively

• Advanced English writing skills

• Project management and organizational experience

• Proficiency in essential computer programs, including statistical programs

• The opportunity to work with extraordinarily experienced and committed colleagues

• A 9-month fellowship with a monthly salary of 400 USD a month and other benefits

What you will be required to do

• Write analytical policy papers

• Contribute to complex research projects on issues that are important to Georgia’s future

• Work harder than you ever have before

• Learn and be extremely inquisitive

• Be an active member of a team and work independently

Who is eligible

• Georgian citizens between the ages of 20 and 30 holding a minimum of a bachelor’s degree

• Those available to commit to a minimum of 6 hours of work per day starting from mid-January through October 2011

• Those with excellent English reading, writing, speaking and understanding abilities

• Those who are good writers in their native Georgian language

The Application process

Step 1: Fill out this application form and submit it no later than November 30, 2010.

Step 2: If you are short listed, you will be asked to take two different tests.

Step 3: After the tests, if you are selected for the next round, you will be invited for an intensive training for 10-14 days from mid-January 2011.

Step 4: The best candidates will be selected to receive the Junior Fellowships and will be employed from February until the end of October 2011. Further employment opportunities are possible.

Other Details

If you have any questions about the application process, please send an email to Tamuna Khoshtaria at JFPGeorgia@crrccenters.org.

Crowdsourcing: Lessons Learned

We have previously posted on some of our crowdsourcing work, also here. This may seem like a niche interest, but it is part of our broader approach: making sure that the voices of ordinary citizens in the Caucasus are heard. Surveys are one way of doing that, crowdsourcing is another tool that we are working with.

On October 13, we presented some of the lessons we learned at a conference on Social Media, at the Frontline Club in Georgia.

The video quality is not great, and we spoke to the crowd, not the camera, but you will get the idea. We summarize the main six lessons we drew out of the project and here is the link to the presentation. Yep, they are pretty obvious in retrospect, but not all of it was so clear to us at the time. The talk, primarily by Jonne Catshoek, starts at 1.16.00. If you want to hear more, let us know.

Forbidden Love: Attitudes Toward Interethnic Marriage in the South Caucasus

While attitudes toward interethnic friendship can give an idea of how people feel about others in their personal lives, the Caucasus Barometer survey probes further into core beliefs by asking about attitudes toward interethnic marriage. In analyzing their replies, we gain an insight into how different ethnicities come into play in the context of marriage and the formation of a family. Because the family as a unit makes up the traditional conception of a society as such, typically attitudes toward interethnic marriage are more conservative even when interethnic friendship is accepted. This holds to be true in the case of the Caucasus countries according to the CB 2009 data.

In addition to the question about approval of interethnic friendship, the same question was asked about approval of a woman of one’s ethnicity marrying someone from these same groups. When compared with the findings of the question about friendship, all three countries have majorities of respondents disapproving of marriages outside of their ethnic group or nationality. The one surprising exception is a narrow majority of Armenians – 51%—approve of Armenian women marrying Russians.

Georgians are less than enthusiastic about interethnic marriage, but still more so than their Armenian and Azerbaijani counterparts. With the Armenian-Russian exception, Georgians have relatively high approval levels for Italians, Greeks, Russians, Americans, and Germans, between 37% and 41% viewing such mixed marriages favorably. Marriages with Abkhazians and Ossetians both fared comparably to those with Europeans; both had 36% of respondents approving.



Armenians are also disapproving of inter-marriage, except for a narrow majority of 51% approving of Armenian-Russian marriages. Armenians are slightly less accepting than Georgians, but also without dramatic drops in approval of marriages with many European groups, which had more than 30% approving of mixed marriages with Europeans.


Azerbaijanis are the least supportive of friendship with other ethnicities, so it is also not surprising to observe the highest levels of disapproval of Azerbaijani women’s marrying men of other ethnicities. Only 49% approve of Azerbaijani women marrying Turks, compared to 82% approving of friendship. The other ethnicities that a majority of Azerbaijanis approved of friendship with – Germans and Russians—fared dramatically worse on the question of marriage, having only 9% and 8% approving respectively. Ninety-nine percent of Azerbaijanis looked unfavorably on a mixed Armenian-Azerbaijani marriage.



Marriage and subsequently family ties are far more personal than a simple friendship – marriages yield children, and children are the future of every nation. Changes in the traditional conception of a national identity based on ethnicity is perceived as a threat to the survival of the nation in its present form and this may be an explanation for the significant drop in approval of ethnically mixed marriages from friendship in the South Caucasus. Yet what is the relationship between approval of such friendships and marriages? How far does ethnic identity play a role in the shaping of such attitudes? What are the factors that could influence more tolerance toward interethnic bonds? Tell us your opinion by posting a reply!

Click on the charts for a clearer view, and access our data here.

Will You Be My Friend? Gauging Perceptions of Interethnic Friendship in the South Caucasus

With ever-increasing globalized societies, ethnically homogeneous states are fewer and fewer. Increased mobility has resulted in freer movement for migration and travel, and advances in technology have made constant communication easy across the globe. No doubt, these developments have made friendships between different nationalities more common, and even taken for granted in many places. Yet traditional values persist, and by examining attitudes towards this phenomenon, we can gain an understanding of a country’s social dynamics as well as predicting potential conflicts.

In the CRRC 2009 Caucasus Barometer survey, respondents in all three Caucasus countries were polled about whether or not they approve of friendship and in a separate question to be discussed later, of marriage (of a woman of their ethnicity) with various other nationalities. Of the three countries, Georgians are the most accepting of friendship with other ethnicities of the three countries, with an overwhelming majority of respondents approving of friendship with every nationality, Italians and Greeks scoring the highest at 83%, followed closely by Americans, at 82%.


The majority of Armenians approve of friendship with other nationalities, with the exception of Turks and Azerbaijanis, of which 66% and 70% disapprove of respectively. Notably, the highest level of approval of friendship with another ethnic group is 93% for Russians, followed by Americans, at 79%.


Azerbaijan is by far the most disapproving of friendship with other ethnicities. Most Azerbaijanis disapprove of interethnic friendship with the exception of 82% approving of friendship with Turks, and 52% favoring friendship with Russians. While unsurprising within the context of protracted strife between Armenia and Azerbaijan, a staggering 97% of Azerbaijanis disapprove of friendship with Armenians.

What accounts for such different attitudes toward interethnic friendship? Why are Georgians the most “friendly” while Azerbaijanis the least? A high level of Georgians’ approval of friendship with Russians as well as Abkhazians and Ossetians suggests that political tension between nations alone is not sufficient for animosity on a personal level. While tracking the root causes of such attitudes is not straightforward, uncovering them could have profound policy implications for fostering peaceful relations in part through positive attitudes toward friendship across ethnicity. What do you think are the causes of such rifts and what is the policy direction to improve tolerance on a state level? Check our data to find out more and post a reply with your thoughts.

Survey of PhD Students in Georgia

We recently undertook a small online survey of PhD students at Georgia's two major universities. This comes at a time when significant programs and support are already available to Georgian PhD students: CSS is launching a new PhD program, ASCN is offering significant research opportunities, the US Embassy will launch a program with Ilia State University, and now there is CARTI as a further opportunity.

The survey was done in Georgian, had 108 respondents, who probably are representative of active and engaged PhD students in Tbilisi, by virtue of responding to the request for participation. One should, of course, be cautious about generalizing from the results.

What, then, about existing students? 23 respondents said they had earned their degree abroad, while 75 said they had not. English seems in the ascendancy: 83 respondents said they had professional competency in English, compared with 66 in Russian, 12 in German and 6 in French.

PhD students are busy, and not only with their dissertation: 44 respondents said that they were teaching at university, and 81 respondents said they also had another job outside university. The jobs outside university are distributed across public-sector (33), NGO (25), private sector (20), and other (17). This illustrates that it may be difficult for students to focus on their research in the way that many Western PhD students can.

Libraries are surpassed by electronic resources. Only seven respondents say they use libraries. Free electronic materials are used by 31 respondents, and electronic catalogues such as EBSCO by 21, with 12 saying that they have a password to electronic libraries of universities abroad. Eleven respondents say they get materials from abroad. No one says that they use sources that exist in their department.

The upgrading of skills of Georgian professors at universities is seen as necessary or very necessary by 74 of the respondents. The PhD students themselves attend a fair amount of trainings. The last training they attended was on their field of specialization (28), teaching methods (26), research methods (22) and academic writing (5). 27 respondents said that this last training took place abroad, illustrating that PhD students enjoy reasonable levels of mobility.

And which skills do PhD students want to upgrade the most? 50 respondents told us they need training research methods, 21 want training in their particular field of specialization, 13 in teaching methods, and 10 in academic writing.

To be sure, this was the survey we organized in a little more than an afternoon, primarily out of curiosity. It suggests that more systematic work should be done to understand how to develop Georgia's research capacity. Given the amount of investment into PhD programs and research support, the PhD students themselves are curiously underresearched.

If you want access to the data, please post a comment or get in touch with us.

Is the Caucasus in Europe or Asia? | Tim Straight at TEDxYerevan

A particularly intriguing talk at TEDxYerevan was given by Tim Straight, Honorary Consul of Norway and Finland to Armenia. Is the Caucasus in Europe or in Asia? Tim highlighted that there are five countries that defy easy categorization: Russia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and also Turkey. Tim explores how the dividing lines fall according to corporations, mapmakers and values.





In his talk, Tim drew on data from CRRC, but also from the World Values Survey. From CRRC, Jenny Paturyan and Laurene Aubert analyzed the data, helping to make the talk happen. Please let others know about the talk, if you liked it. (If the link does not work, let us know, we just updated it.)

Ask CRRC | Survey vs Census

Q: What’s the difference between a survey and a census?

A: In short – census takers attempt to contact all members of a population, while surveyors select a sample of people from the population and use the responses of those people to draw conclusions about the proportions of people in the greater population holding various opinions.

There are many advantages to conducting a survey rather than a census, and here are some key examples: 

Firstly, results can be produced much more quickly with a survey than with a census. Imagine that you want to gauge Georgian political opinion just before an election. How much time would it take you to interview every adult Georgian? How many interviewers would you need to train in order to conduct all of the interviews in the month before the elections? A political opinion survey conducted by CRRC immediately before the May 2010 elections employed 100 interviewers to attempt 3,284 interviews. The adult population of Georgia is approximately 3.5 million persons, meaning that a census would require roughly 106,577 interviewers.

Secondly, the far smaller number of interviews conducted in a survey means that you can allocate more of your resources towards ensuring quality. Would you want to spend your money providing a competitive salary to 100 quality interviewers and training them well, or would you rather spend your money paying a minimal wage to 106,577 interviewers and training them insufficiently? In short, a survey allows for more resources to be allocated to other aspects of the process. CRRC invests resources in ensuring quality throughout the survey process, including performing checks to ensure interviewer integrity and entering the data from each interview into the database twice in order to catch data entry errors.

Thirdly, with a survey you can spend your time and money making sure that you collect information on all members of your sample. You can revisit houses where you didn’t find people at home the first time. This is important because certain parts of the population are harder to reach than others. For example, women, older people, and unemployed people are all more likely to be at home when an interviewer visits. These demographic groups may have different answers to survey questions than their counterparts, and a sample that over-represents them may be biased. CRRC interviewers randomly select a respondent in each selected household. If that household member isn’t home, the interviewer schedules a re-visit to the household, and makes a total of three visits to attempt to find that household member at home. This ensures that the sample contains a representative mix of men and women, young and old, employed and unemployed.

The reasons listed above are all interrelated – time, money, and manpower are always limited, and conducting a survey allows an organization to gain as much information as possible for the resources that they expend. However, in some cases the situation is even more extreme – in some cases, the object of measurement has to be destroyed in order to be measured. Think of how a manufacturer measures the number of calories per cookie: they burn a cookie in a machine called a bomb calorimeter, shown in the figure above. The number of calories in the cookie is a measure of how much heat the cookie produces when burned. Not every cookie is identical, so manufacturers take a sample of cookies. They burn each one in a bomb calorimeter, and report the average number of calories generated per cookie in the sample. If they performed a census on the population of cookies and burned every cookie, there would be nothing left to sell.

DRC & CRRC's Migration Report

External migration from Georgia since its independence in 1991 has significantly influenced the shape and dynamics of modern Georgia. For instance, almost everyone in Georgia knows at least someone who has migrated. Entire families are supported by remittances sent home and entire communities have been altered by these movements. Georgia's supply of labor, particularly highly skilled labor, has also been significantly affected.

The Caucasus Research Resource Centre (CRRC) – Georgia, in cooperation with Danish Refugee Council, has sought to go beyond the numbers and to highlight the voices of both migrants themselves and households whence migrants depart.

This report seeks to provide a current and comprehensive overview of the migration trends of Georgian citizens since 1995 and it is hoped that this report will lead to better policies and more discussion on how to better maximize human resources in Georgia and around the world.

In addition, this report seeks to provide context and baseline analysis of the current return population and programmatic efforts. It utilizes a variety of research projects, including two different sets of focus groups, to provide as comprehensive a snapshot as possible of the current migration trends. Furthermore, it is designed to be used for the development of a return and reintegration program, and therefore attempts to shape the information in such a manner.

The report was compiled way way back in 2007 and is now finally available on CRRC's site.

Armenia’s ranking in the World Governance Indicators

The recently updated database of the World Governance Indicators (WGI) shows an improvement in Armenia’s ranking in political stability, fight against corruption, government effectiveness and regulatory quality. A project of World Bank and Brookings Institution, WGI provides governance ranking of over 200 countries since 1996 on six indicators: Voice of Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of Violence, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law and Control of Corruption. WGI uses a 0-100 percentile ranking indicating the rank of the country among all countries in the world where 0 is the lowest and 100 the highest rank. Despite the reported progress, however, Armenia is still at the lower 50 percentile of the countries included in the study.

Where does Armenia stand in the list of the post-Soviet countries? Armenia is scoring higher than most of the post-Soviet countries (excluding the Baltic states) on all the indicators except Political Stability and Voice of Accountability. Armenia’s score on Voice of Accountability, an indicator capturing citizens’ participation in selecting the government, freedom of expression, freedom of association and free media is not only low, but it has deteriorated over the last decade.

Armenia along with the rest of the post-Soviet countries is also ranked low on the Control of Corruption indicator, with the majority of the countries at the 0-25 percentile. Georgia is scoring significantly better than other post-Soviet countries.

Actually, Georgia is leading the list of the post-Soviet countries on all the indicators except the Political Stability and Absence of Violence indicator, where it is ranked at the same percentile with Russia, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan (0-25 percentile). In the light of the contested presidential elections of 2008 it is rather surprising that Armenia (ranked at the 25-50 percentile) has recorded improvement on the indicator since 2004.

The aggregate indicators combine the views of large samples of the citizens, experts, enterprises and other available indexes. Detailed methodology and documentation is available on the WGI website. The website also provides a user friendly analysis tool, which creates tables and maps by country, allowing also by year comparisons. Full dataset are publically available and can be downloaded here. And, as always, a reminder that CRRC has done a comprehensive corruption survey of households and business, with materials available here.

The CRRC Georgia Team

These are the CRRC Georgia team members who work hard on the numbers we usually present!

In this photo: celebrating the birthdays of three CRRC colleagues in Mtskheta with great food, great wine and charades in Georgian!

The 2010 World Giving Index

By David McArdle

In recent weeks, CRRC have focused on levels of happiness and satisfaction in the Caucasus. In line with this theme, the World Giving Index 2010 (WGI) has released their latest figures, which they hope will act as a marker of cohesiveness in a society.

Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) published the WGI report, discussing how they believe that almost all countries, cultures and faiths have their own traditions of giving which are complex and shaped by their history, customs and religion.

The report finds that the association between happiness and giving is greater than that of national GDP, or wealth, and giving. Perhaps the level of giving in a country speaks to the strength of its civil society – the extent to which individuals are willing and able to contribute towards addressing the needs of others both in their own localities and across borders.

The results of the WGI placed Australasian neighbours Australia and New Zealand in the top two positions, respectively. As for the Caucasus countries, Azerbaijan was placed as the top country in the Caucasus with regard to giving, ranked 67th out of the 153 countries listed on the WGI, sharing its spot with Botswana, Mongolia, Mexico and Mauritius.



Meanwhile, Armenia was 115th and shared its ranking with El Salvador, Ecuador and Latvia.

Finally, Georgia was situated at a rather low 134th, joined alongside India, Turkey and Cote D’Ivoire (and please refer to the Index’s methodology section for an insight into how ‘giving’ is defined. For instance, the Index regards the term ‘giving’ as not exclusively connected with the donation of monies).



For access to the colourful and accessible report in full, please follow the link to CAF’s site. We’d like to thank Jonathan K. for drawing our attention to this.

Winners of the First Stage of the Junior Research Fellowship Program-Azerbaijan Announced

In August 2010, the Fellowship Selection Committee of the Junior Research Fellowship Program (JRFP)-Azerbaijan had the difficult task of selecting the three best policy papers submitted by program participants. The voting, which was held by secret ballot was extremely difficult because these three papers had minimum differences between scores. Thus, the distribution of the top three winners was unknown until the very last moment. CRRC-Azerbaijan is proud to present the winners of the JRFP policy paper competition: Aynur Ramazanova (first place), Shabnam Agayeva (second place) and Gulnar Mammadova (third place).

The competition for best policy paper was open to students or recent graduates of Azerbaijani Universities between the ages of 18 and24. Before working on their papers, participants were invited to become members of the CRRC Moodle Platform and to take two courses: Introduction to Public Policy Analysis and Academic Writing for Policy Analysis. These courses provided participants with the basic knowledge and skills necessary to successfully complete their papers. All of the projects conducted by students were remarkable and touched upon various significant social issues ranging from control over genetically modified products to e-government, and from programs for juvenile offenders to respiratory diseases among children.

The winner of the contest, Aynur Ramazanova, discussed the challenging issue of corruption in Azerbaijani Universities using Azerbaijan Medical Universities as her case study. Her findings indicate that 89.3% of students surveyed in the project had paid cash bribes at least once. Among the indicated causes of corruption were low teaching wages, a weak system of control over corruption in the higher education system, and the incompetence of management staff at universities. Results also found that students were often reluctant to learn and invest their energy into education since chances for a decent occupation on the labor market usually depend on the ability to pay bribe, rather than on their level of professionalism. The research also discusses the relationship between corruption and the general climate in society. When corruption and nepotism are a norm, students become socialized to it from early childhood. The author concludes that this negative socialization should be challenged through “positive propaganda” in the mass media and educational programs that will promote alternative values and show that corruption can easily suspend a country’s development.

The second place winner, Shabnam Agayeva, discussed the problem of inadequate services for survivors of marital physical abuse. She interviewed workers at NGOs that provide services for battered women. She also examined secondary sources to conclude that the absence of cooperation between key institutions such as hospitals, legal advice centers, crisis centers, shelters and police significantly hinders adequate responses to domestic violence. Therefore, the development of policy mechanisms to address this must be considered.

The third winner, Gulnar Mammadova, discussed the issue of education in her paper “Challenges of General Secondary Education at Public Schools in Azerbaijan: How to Turn the ’Quality of Reality’ into the ‘Reality of Quality’?” In her paper, Gulnar recommends expanding the size of public financing in education and ensuring effective budget distribution in order to confront important issues such as poor quality schooling in Azerbaijan.

The winners of this competition will be awarded iPods and the other participants of the JRFP competition will be awarded book vouchers. These are only the results of the first stage of the JRFP program. We anticipate many more interesting and challenging projects from our participants in the next two stages. The program will conclude in June 2011 with a conference where participants will publicly present their research projects.

The Junior Research Fellowship Program is implemented by CRRC office in Azerbaijan and was made possible with the generous support of the Open Society Institute, Think Tank Fund.

Aleksey Hovakimyan on Rural & Economic Development in Armenia

While writing his PhD, Aleksey Hovakimyan was a regular user of CRRC-Armenia, often working in the computer lab or the library. We therefore were delighted to hear that his PhD thesis has now been published, and wanted to support him in spreading the word of his book's release.

Hovakimyan's book, Rural Clusters and Structural Transformation: An Exploratory Case Study in Armenia, concerns the change in the structure of an economy as an important process for long-term development. This key process, called structural transformation, reflects the change in the contribution of the agriculture, industry and service sectors within the national economy.

The book also examines the cluster concept, which is generally a geographic concept from regional economics and economic geography. Since its origin, the cluster concept mostly refers to the industry sector, and very little academic literature directly ties structural transformation to rural cluster formation in developing countries. Hovakimyan's work, therefore, tries to do so through an exploratory case study of Armenia, and examines three dimensions: space (cluster concept), time (structural transformation) and levels of change (from national to household level).

The book also provides an overview of relevant theories and approaches, as well as the case analysis helpful to understand the economic behaviour/choice of rural households within the realities of developing countries which have various gaps and shortcomings in infrastructure and institutions.

This work should be especially useful to students, development researchers and practitioners, or anyone else who is interested in rural and economic development. For more information and to purchase the book, go here.

Googling the Application Address

One of the bugbears of announcing a new position is that you get plenty of application spam. Many of the people have barely read the announcement, and blast out an e-mail attaching their CV, sometimes copying three of four other firms into the e-mail. A vacancy can generate 60 to 70 applications, of which only 10 to 15 are relevant. While we go through them quickly, it is unproductive time, and it's even a little sad, looking at so much helplessness.

Now we are trying a new method, of hiding the e-mail address that we request applications to. Anyone qualified should be able to figure this out, and application-spammers (there must be a better term in there somewhere) are unlikely to make the effort.

Those of you familiar with Gmail will know that anything with a plus sign still arrives, if the previous word indicates an existing address. However, we can effectively filter the application, making sure that only those that got it right get a "For Review" label attached.
 

It is the typical spiral of technology providing solutions (ease of application), creating problems (quantity of applications), until we use the next countermeasure to increase thresholds. So far, no spam received.

Life Satisfaction in Armenia and Azerbaijan

By David McArdle & Jesse Tatum

After investigating what makes Georgians happy in a July blog based on data from the World Values Survey (WVS), we wondered how a similar analysis would look in Armenia and Azerbaijan. This time, using data from the 2008 European Values Survey (EVS) to compare the two, we found that, first, people claiming higher life satisfaction do not inevitably place a greater emphasis on religion in either country.

Second, the EVS data also showed that higher job satisfaction was said to be more essential by those satisfied with life in Azerbaijan, and was even more so the case in Armenia. Next, being in good health was more significant for the Armenians satisfied with life than for the Azerbaijanis in the same category. Finally, high rates of life satisfaction and of happiness, as observed in the WVS results for Georgia, simply do not always mirror each other. In short, Armenians and Azerbaijanis can be satisfied without being completely happy.

Religion

The data revealed that those Armenians and Azerbaijanis completely satisfied with life do not always place the highest importance upon religion. In Armenia, of those who are ‘completely satisfied’ with life, 33% value religion as ‘very important’. However, of those who list themselves as ‘completely dissatisfied’ with life, a slightly higher value of 36% rate religion as ‘very important’. Thus in Armenia, according to the figures, religion is as much associated with life dissatisfaction as it is with life satisfaction.



Similar to Armenia, slightly more than a quarter (26%) of Azerbaijanis who are completely satisfied in life also say that religion is very important. On the other hand, a slightly higher percentage (30%) of those who are completely satisfied claim that religion is ‘not important’ in life. Furthermore, of those who assert that they are completely dissatisfied in life, fully 45% say that religion is ‘very important’. There are obviously factors other than religion which tend to lead to life satisfaction in both countries, and these results stand contrary to the WVS data for Georgia, where everyone, regardless of life satisfaction, appeared to place importance on religion.



Job satisfaction

In Azerbaijan, the data showed a possible connection between high life satisfaction and high job satisfaction. Taking into account only those who said they were employed, 53% of those completely satisfied with their lives chose between 8 and 10 on the ten-point job satisfaction scale where ‘10’ denotes complete job satisfaction.

In Armenia, a similar association between higher life and job satisfaction was observed. In all, 50% of those completely satisfied with life who said they are employed chose 8–10 on the same job satisfaction scale. In addition, 61% of Armenians completely dissatisfied with life and employment chose 1–3 on the scale, the three lowest choices, where ‘1’ equals complete dissatisfaction with one’s job.


Health

Health was arguably a noteworthy factor for overall life satisfaction in Armenia. Seventy-five percent of those completely satisfied with life also judged their health to be either ‘very good’ or ‘good’. Moreover, only 5% of those completely satisfied with life deemed their health ‘poor’ or ‘very poor’.

However, even for those Armenians completely dissatisfied with life there are still 28% who rate their health to be ‘very good’ or ‘good’, while 39% judge their health to be ‘poor’ or ‘very poor’. Thus, though the data highlights that perceptions of health might influence the degree of overall life satisfaction, it does not necessarily affect life dissatisfaction.



In contrast with Armenia, being in good health appeared to play less of a role for those Azerbaijanis completely satisfied in life, 43% of which either see themselves to be in ‘very good’ or ‘good’ health. Still, 10% completely satisfied with life rate their health as ‘poor’ or ‘very poor’. Furthermore, 52% of those completely dissatisfied with life actually remarked that their health is ‘very good’ or ‘good’. According to these results, health as a determining factor ranks much lower for Azerbaijanis than job satisfaction does, for instance, in being potentially associated with satisfaction in life.



Happiness

According to the data, for Azerbaijanis, higher levels of happiness did not seem to be associated with higher levels of life satisfaction. In fact, more who said that they were dissatisfied with life still claimed to be ‘very happy’ (18%) than did those who are satisfied with life (7%). As was the case with Georgians, perhaps happiness and life satisfaction are two separate concepts which need not necessarily run parallel to each other.



In Armenia the data show that the greater their life satisfaction, the more the respondents in Armenia said that they are ‘very happy’. In all, 90% who are completely satisfied in life indicate that they are ‘very’ or ‘quite’ happy. Still, 58% of those who are dissatisfied with life also ranked themselves ‘very’ or ‘quite’ happy, which, as with Armenia’s neighbors, may mean that there is more in life that drives levels of happiness upwards.



Conclusion

Data from both the WVS and EVS surveys are extensive and expose nuances which highlight some fascinating differences between the three states of the South Caucasus. Why is religion so important in Georgia regardless of life satisfaction and not so for those respondents in Armenia and Azerbaijan? Why is happiness not proportionally bound with life satisfaction in all three nations? Why do the Armenians polled greatly value health when judging overall life satisfaction in contrast to the Azerbaijanis who do not equate good health with overall life satisfaction? Interested in finding out more? The EVS online data analysis is available here, and the WVS here.

New Associate Regional Director at CRRC

I am excited to be the new Associate Regional Director at CRRC and to work with a staff dedicated to constantly improving the quality of data from the South Caucasus. I aim to promote new social science research and to ensure a vibrant and local research community in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia.

I am a California native who specializes in comparative politics, post-communist politics and both qualitative and quantitative methodologies. A few of my academic interests include nationalism and the intersection of politics and religion, especially in the post-Soviet region. My current research focuses on secular regimes and state engagement with religion in post-Soviet Eurasia.

My journey in the post-Soviet region began in 1999 when I first visited Irkutsk, Russia in Eastern Siberia as a participant in an environmental exchange program (The Tahoe-Baikal Institute). I lived with a Buryat family that summer and began to study the political history of the Russian Empire, Soviet Union and the 15 post-Soviet countries. In the following years, I traveled or worked throughout Western Russia, Ukraine, Latvia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia (as well as much of Eastern Europe and many other parts of the world).

I was able to combine my persistent interest with this region with the political and methodological training that I had received at the University of California, Berkeley where I am a current Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science and where I completed my second Master's degree in 2005. I also earned a M.A. in Russian and Eurasian Studies at the European University of St. Petersburg, Russia in 2003 and a B.A. at the University of California, Davis where I studied Russian and Mathematics. This prior training also contributed to my combination of area studies and methodological knowledge that I hope to employ at CRRC.

As Associate Regional Director, I will endeavor to strengthen the quality of social science research and publications, as well as public policy analysis in the region. I also look forward to working with the CRRC team in all three countries, Eurasia Partnership Foundation, local community members, and various organizations that are also enthusiastic about and committed to our vision.

CRRC's Media-Monitoring Project: TV Coverage of the Election Campaigns

How do the Georgian media frame political information for its viewers? This was an especially relevant question during the lead-up to the May 30th local elections, and a subject of much public debate. To add greater insight to this debate, CRRC-Georgia, at the UNDP and European Delegation’s request, carried out a media-monitoring project of Georgia’s six major television channels.

Five weeks before and one week after the May 30th local government and Tbilisi mayoral elections, CRRC monitored the six TV channels – the Georgian Public Broadcaster, Rustavi 2, Kavkasia, Maestro, Imedi, and Real TV – and produced a media-monitoring report comprising of quantitative and qualitative elements.

In the quantitative section, factors such as the tone of coverage of each candidate and party, and the ratio of direct and indirect speech for candidates within the allocated time were measured. Meanwhile, in the qualitative part, components such as hidden advertisements, objective vs. neutral coverage, and black public relations were evaluated, among others.

Full access to both the quantitative results and the final report can be found on the UNDP’s website.