Suppose you are working as an economic analyst in a research organization. Monitoring and interpreting macroeconomic data
Question:
Suppose you are working as an economic analyst in a research organization. Monitoring and interpreting macroeconomic data are a routine part of your job. Your manager requested you to analyze the trends in GDP in several developed and developing countries.
a) Collect and present (in a line-graph format) the annual data for GDP per capita (in constant U.S. dollar) for the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, China, and India for the 1960-2019 period (i.e., all data for all years starting from 1960, 1961, ..till 2019). Use a graphing tool in Excel or a similar application to create GDP per capita line graphs for all countries in one chart.
N.B. Your chart should display a descriptive title, axis labels, a key, and a brief data source below the chart. (e.g. source: World Bank, 2020 and/or OECD, 2020). A good source of reliable international data is the Data Bank of the World Bank: https://databank.worldbank.org/source/world- development-indicators#.
b) Collect data (from the same source as above) for GDP per capita growth for all the eight countries for 1961-2019. Use these data to compute the average growth rate of GDP per capita for each country. Report average growth rates of GDP per capita for all the eight countries in a table. You do not have to report growth rates for all the years; we just need the average growth rates over 1961 to 2019 for each country.
c) Based on your answers to (a) and (b), what similarities and differences do you observe in these seven countries? Is there any catch-up effect? Explain based on the concepts learned in this unit.
Fundamentals of corporate finance
ISBN: 978-0470876442
2nd Edition
Authors: Robert Parrino, David S. Kidwell, Thomas W. Bates