Exercise 1 IRCO 412: Globalization, the World System and the Pacific This assignment is due Tuesday, January 15, at the beginning of class. Your assigned country is South Africa. You will use this country for all subsequent assignments as well. ASSIGNMENT: For this exercise, we ask you to download some simple data on your country for the last 10 to 20 years and compare it to another country or group of countries. Collect data on two indicators: growth of GDP, and investment as a share of GDP. Present this data in two separate graphs or tables. Please submit a single page with two graphs or tables on it displaying this information. Write a short paragraph or two that says what the data show. Do not interpret or explain the data. Do not develop any hypotheses about why the data show what they show. The purpose of the exercise is to familiarize you with downloading statistics and presenting them clearly in an easily-understandable format. Use the comparison with other economies as a benchmarking exercise. Think about how you benchmark your country. You could compare it to another country in the same region; to the average of a group of countries in the same region; to the region as a whole; or to countries of a similar size or level of income. Whatever choice you make, justify why the comparison makes sense in a sentence or two. NOTE: The one page limit is a strict requirement. Do not run over onto a second page or side. To answer this question, please access primary data sources. The World Bank “World Development Indicators” is the easiest way to get this data. Do not use secondary sources. Remember that, to be meaningful, data must be normalized. (Data is normalized when it is transformed in a way that makes it conform to a common standard.) Many data series in the World Development Indicators have already been normalized. Make sure to use a normalized series, or to create your own normalization. After normalizing, a good benchmark is a...
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