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Teaching Economics

Enrichment

How we make pencils

Geoff Riley

17th September 2019

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Get those pencils ready to pick out a huge amount of microeconomics in this brilliant 4 minute clip from Faber-Castell which produces 2.3 billion pencils a year and has been in business for over two hundred and fifty years.

This is such a rich video for classroom use - what is the marginal cost of a pencil? What is the importance of human capital to the value added process? What internal economies of scale might a business such as Faber-Castell utilise? How significant are family businesses to the wider health of the German economy?

How we make pencils
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Geoff Riley

Geoff Riley FRSA has been teaching Economics for nearly forty years. He has over twenty years experience as Head of Economics at leading schools. He writes extensively and is a contributor and presenter on CPD and Revision conferences in the UK and overseas.

@tutor2uGeoff

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