Data literacy in economic development

Abstract

In economic development and other economics electives, students regularly encounter economic measures of absolute and relative deprivation, from poverty measures like the Foster-Greer-Thorbecke index to measures of distribution like the Gini index. By "doing economics," students practice applying economic measurement to real-world data and develop more general data literacy. The author proposes a series of exercises starting with stylized 10-household economies, proceeding to nationally representative cross-sectional surveys using MS Excel or Google Spreadsheets, and culminating in students applying their acquired data literacy to a team project. The data sources are easily tailored to alternative household surveys in low-and middleincome countries that include the required variables. Students learn data literacy through recognizing the properties of rectangular data, visualizing data appropriately, and creating aggregate economic measures.

Learning Tableau: A data visualization tool

“…Excel is a workhorse software for many tasks, including data "cleaning" and visualization. Halliday (2019) includes an assignment for an economic development class that uses Excel to graph a Lorenz Curve. At first, students work with prepackaged data, and then they progress to collecting and "cleaning" data from a public site.…”