Data Literacy for Economic Development: Online Appendix

On this appendix page you will find resources and links for “Data Literacy for Econmic Development.”

A. Class Context and Syllabus

  1. Syllabus for my class Economic Development (ECO211) in the Economics Department at Smith College pdf.

B. Example Economy Exercises

  1. Printout for students with example economies pdf and docx
  2. Income and poverty instructions for Students pdf and docx
  3. Inequality instructions for Students pdf and docx
  4. Guidelines for instructors for the exercises pdf and docx
  5. Solutions for instructors for example economies xlsx

C. Excel Real-World Data Exercise Sample Documents

  1. Note: I cannot provide the data on a public site, a potential user can request the NIDS and upon that request I can share data and/or do files. The data are publicly available, but the user should preferably access the data herself at the DataFirst Research Unit.
  2. Sample sheet mirroring the data with 10 household-rows xls
  3. Accompanying description in docx and pdf.
  4. Solutions for instructors for sample data data xlsx
  5. Additional sample economy with nested IF() statement as exercise xls

D. Stata Files for Generating Spreadsheets

  1. Stata .do files for converting South African National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS) to a workable spreadsheet:
    1. Working with 2008 NIDS: nids_data_setup.do
    2. Working with 2014 NIDS: nids2014.do

E. Additional Documents

  1. Example spreadsheet to teach students about if statements (the basics) xls
  2. Example spreadsheet for FGT(\(\alpha\)) and understanding the poverty Head Count Ratio, Poverty Gap, etc: xls.
  3. Example spreadsheet to teach students about matching and indexing, xls
  4. Example spreadsheet to teach the human development index and using math in Excel: xls

F. Problem Sets with Solutions and Examples

  1. Problem Set 1: PS1, PS1 Data xls, PS 1 Data Solutions xls
  2. Problem Set 2: PS2, PS 2 Data Solutions xls – note, PS2 did not have a data exercise per se, I simply encourage students to attempt it in Excel and I showed them my solution afterwards and distributed the solutions document to them.
  3. Problem Set 3: PS3, PS3 Data xls, PS 3 Data Solutions xls

G. R Code for figures in the paper

I coded all of the figures in the paper in R. I provide links to the R code for the figures. This is intended for instructors or interested advanced students and should not be viewed as part of the exercise itself.

  1. Figure 1: “The Lorenz Curve for Economy J is shown by the solid black line. The line of perfect equality is shown by the dashed line.” Code
  2. Figure 2: “Bar chart to calculate Gini for Economy D. Data are from Table 3” Code
  3. Figure 3: “Lorenz curves for artificial countries. Data are from Table 3.” Code