Summer Blogs

Now it is time to finalize the paper and put it in an appropriate format. At this point, I know what my paper is going to discuss.

Surprisingly, the actual writing of the paper is not as challenging to me as formulating my thoughts. I plan to divide the paper into six sections:

Introduction

Review of economic development in Eastern Europe

Data and regression technique

Results

Comparison to Western European countries

Conclusion

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In the test that I am using for my research (PIRLS), Georgia does not rank high... However, Russia is number one on the list. This result is very puzzling for me to interpret because Russia has not reformed its educational system as much as Georgia did. On the other hand, Georgia has decentralized its educational system and has 100% literacy rate but it still does not show good results in PIRLS. I think I need to look at differences between city and village schools of Georgia.

According to Dr. Brat, education is just one variable and it varies and so does its impact on an economy. In addition, the complexity mentioned above will makes this to be a good paper.

I will also take the following variables into consideration:

Investment rates

Population growth

Technology

Corruption

Ease of doing business

Investment climate

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I am trying to derive the main argument of my research.

Ammermueller, Heijke, and Woessmann use seven countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, Slovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania) which they group into two categories in the end. The first group, as they say, has progressed far in transition because they have higher mean scores than the others. And the second group of countries produce denser distribution of educational achievement, which is a characteristic of Communist societies.

I decided to pick seven countries, (Bulgaria, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Romania) and break them up into two groups at the end like Ammermueller, Heijke, and Woessmann do. I also want to mention the World Bank's rank of ease of doing business and speak about the investment climate in those  countries.

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Since education is one of the most important topics of my research, I was looking for international tests that cover Georgia. This way I could conduct a cross country study by comparing the Georgia's test score with the countries in the same region.

I was able to find Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) test which was conducted in Georgia in 2006.

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It has been more than a week since I came back to Georgia and finally was able to adjust to the eight hour time difference.

The topic of my research is economic development of Eastern Europe with particular emphasis on Georgia. Since human capital is one of the most important determinants of economic growth, I will address the secondary education in this research. At this point, I plan to base my research on the research paper by Andreas Ammermüller, Hans Heijke, and Ludger Wößmann, titled Schooling quality in Eastern Europe: Educational production during transition.

Georgia is currently undergoing a profound transition, as it has moved from Soviet control up through 1991 into economic decline from 1991 to 1995 and is now entering a rapid growth period of over 10% growth during the last several years. How will it emerge from its transition? The answer according to many economists will depend on the strength of their institutions and education system. If their institutions prepare students for the modern world of market economics, the likelihood of success is much higher. What is the current state of Georgia’s economy in terms of its education? How will the country emerge from its transition into the free market economy?

These will be some of the questions that I will address in my research.

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