ECON 1541 Statistics Assignment

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ECON 1541 Statistics Assignment

ECON 1541 Statistics Assignment

You must produce an individual report investigating the data sets provided on Blackboard, which are found from the World Bank website:

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator

This data is from the World Bank and looks at national income, poverty, and inequality.

You should start by choosing which part of the dataset you are going to focus on, and extracting the relevant data. You may want to focus on one or two particular years, or one or two different geographic areas. I do not expect to use all of the data; you must start by picking out the data that you will use.

You report should then include:

-          A description of the major features of the data (the centrality of the data, the spread of the data, how it may vary over time and between regions). You will use the techniques from the first two statistics lectures in this section.

-          An analysis of the data on income, inequality and poverty.  You may wish to investigate whether there are significant differences between regions, or major change between two or more years, are these changes in one country/regions income correlated with those in other areas, or to what extent are inequality and poverty related? To do this you will use confidence interval and hypothesis testing techniques, correlation and the comparison of two populations.

You may gather extra data in order to aid your report if you wish to.  The World Bank site has a large variety of data that you could use.

Be careful with which methods you use to analyse the data. In particular some methods are more suitable for time series data (tracking one value over a number of years), whereas others are more suitable for cross-sectional data (several values at a particular point in time).

Be careful that any tables you use are labelled appropriately and are correctly referred to in the text.

I will be looking for the following things when awarding marks for this assignment:

• A well presented report, which clearly highlights the main results.

• A clear structure, with an introduction and a conclusion that summarises the main findings of your report.

• The ability to use the statistical techniques we have studied in this course to present and analyse data in a meaningful fashion.

• The ability to relate your statistical findings to some basic theory about the functioning of the economy and economic events in order to make sense of the statistics.

An example of a good quality report of this type will be provided on Blackboard.