Student-led Research in Economics - PowerPoint Profile Sheets

Many thanks to Geoff for providing three PowerPoint-based resources designed to stimulate some research by economics students on a selection of countries and businesses of their choice.

AS Macro - Country Profiles

This research document Invites students to explore information relating to key measures of macro performance and aspects of economic development

Teachers may provide some helpful links e.g. to World Economic Forum or Economic Freedom Index. Alternatively they they might hold back and see which sources the students themselves come up with!

The PowerPoint file contains one sheet per country, Geoff suggests that, for a good comparative mix, students choose three nations - at least one advanced OECD country, one of the BRIC/MINT countries and a country from sub Saharan Africa.

Completed research sheets provide an ideal opportunity for classroom discussion including the reliability of data sources, how each of the indicators is measured and relative strengths and weaknesses of a country's macroeconomic performance

A2 Macro - Country Profiles

This is a similar resource but with a greater focus on building contextual examples for students embarking on a development economics course - the sheets can be updated / built on the course progresses so that a student might have a dozen or more to refer to - with supplementary study notes by the end of the course

A2 Business Economics - Business Profiles

This final resource encourages students to build profiles of a variety of businesses, To gather the most complete data the businesses chosen should ideally be those with multinational operations, a public stock market listing and reasonable public information about their strategy.