Overview and Rationale
You are an economic consultant working for a pressure group. You have been employed to write a report in Microsoft Word containing a statistical analysis conducted in Microsoft Excel. Your employer will give you question they want you to answer. Your employer will also tell you the conclusion that they wish you reach.
The report must look professional and be written in a formal tone. It should not read like a polemic, and you should not do anything explicitly dishonest in your analysis. You must arrive at your conclusions by making defensible decisions about data and sample selection, data cleaning, and analysis.
The goal of the exercise is to test your I.T., analysis and communication skills. The context was chosen because writing a report is the most common activity expected of economists, and this exercise will also serve as a preparation for the BSc Project. As a bonus, the exercise will illustrate the importance of trusting the incentives of people writing the reports that you cite.
The structure of a report
Your report will be not be longer than 2500 words, all inclusive. It should contain:
A brief abstract of less than 100 words, outlining your question and conclusions.
An introduction outlining the question that you have been asked, the steps you will take to answer it, and a preview of what you find.
A literature review containing a scholarly description three academic papers you have found, properly referenced in a bibliography. As your goal is to convince, you should choose the most reputable, published articles you can find, that happen to support your intended conclusions.
A description of the data including at least a table of summary statistics, which should include the number of observations, mean, max, and minimum values for the variables you will use.
A graphical and statistical analysis. You will use graphs and statistics to convince your reader. You should appear to be honest about sampling problems – you need at minimum a discussion of confidence intervals.
A very brief conclusion. Just report your question, your answer, and what the consequences might be.
A description (not part of the report) of how you skewed the analysis: You might include what data you chose, how you dealt with it, or linguistic/graphical tricks you used.
Submitting
You must submit two things:
The report in MS Word format. Do not convert to pdf because we need to check that you used the features of MS Word properly when formatting, creating the bibliography, etc.
An excel file containing the honest and skewed analysis The file should contain a sheet with metadata, then sheets with the raw data and honest analysis, and then sheets with the skewed analysis that you include in your report.
Your Employer:
The not-for-profit organisation “Make Britain Great” (MBG). Secretly funded from unknown sources, the primary purpose of this institute is to increase support for a “no-deal” Brexit.
Your Task:
Increase public confidence in the future strength of the UK. Demonstrate using data from Eurostat on GDP (in Euros) that the UK has done comparatively well in Europe since the Brexit vote.
Use the “Eurostat Cleaned” Data (in levels, not in growth.) A suggestion: estimate the increase in UK GDP over time since 2009 (the peak of the crisis) until 2017 inclusive. Compare this to carefully selected countries.
Marks will be awarded for three equally important components: The overall quality of the report; the use of IT Skills; and the quality of your written English
