Country Profile Assignment

Overview

Each of you will give a short 5 minute presentation describing a country’s trade to the class.

Please email me with the country you would like to choose. I will remove countries from this list in the order that I recieve emails claiming them. You may decide to change your country at any time, at which point, I will re-release the country into the pool for others to select, and update the list below:

Last Update: 9:00 PM Wed Nov 11

You can choose any country except for the following that have been claimed:

Assignment

I want you to compile statistics on your country (described below). You will give a presentation on your country during the last week of class.

Country at a Glance

Get data from a reputable source (United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, OECD, etc.) on the following statistics.You might want to look at the last slide of our lesson on measuring development for some data sources!

 You may write down just the number or descriptor for each of the following on your report.You might wish to make a table to organize it.

 For each, please indicate both the source of your data, and the year for the data (try to get the latest possible). Note that some countries may not have data available on all statistics (and be sure to not if none is available).

Your presentation should include:

Macroeconomic Data

  1. Real Gross Domestic Product (and growth rate)
  2. Real GDP/capita (and growth rate)
  3. Unemployment rate
  4. Labor force participation rate
  5. Inflation rate
  6. Budget deficit/surplus as percent of GDP
  7. Debt as percent of GDP
  8. Currency, and exchange rate for 1 U.S. Dollar

Demographic, Equality, and Health Data

  1. Population
  2. Population growth rate
  3. Human development index
  4. Gini coefficient
  5. Life expectancy at birth
  6. Infant mortality rate
  7. % of population living in extreme poverty (under \(\approx\) $2 per day)
  8. Happiness index score

Trade and Economy Data

  1. What are the top 5 exports by value?
  2. Who are the top 5 trading partners?
  3. Trade (imports + exports) as percent of GDP
  4. Doing Business Index score
  5. Amount of Foreign Aid recieved

Institutions

  1. Polity IV score
  2. Freedom house freedom score
  3. Economic freedom score
  4. Corruption Perceptions Index score
  5. Rule of law index score

Be sure to include citations, or a short bibliography of the sources which you used to compile your overview. I do not care about the formatting, just be consistent, and use reputable sources (again, e.g. World Bank, IMF, OECD, UN, CIA World Factbook).

Presentation

On the last week of class, each student will have 5 minutes to present their country. I expect each of you to have slides to describe your country.

Good Data Sources