Labour Market

Assessment task 1: Assignment

Due date: Thursday April 11, 2013

Details of task: This is an individual assessment task. This assignment is designed to test your achievement of weekly learning objectives for weeks 1 - 3. Word limit: There is a word limit of 2000 words.

Content: Please consider figure 6.11 in the textbook by Mishkin. Now consider the following hypothesis: developing countries that showed a substantial decline in population growth are richer now than countries where population growth is still high.

Select some twenty developing countries where population growth was high in the 1960s and 1970s and still quite high comparatively speaking at the beginning of the current century. Select another twenty or so developing countries where population growth is much lower now than in the earlier period.

Please make sure that you include countries from West Asia, South and South-East Asia, Africa and Latin America. Do not include nations that were already rich in the 1960s.

Plot a graph with real gdp per capita (corrected for PPP) from Wikipedia or IMF, World Bank or CIA on the vertical axis and the change in the rate of population growth on the horizontal axis and comment on your findings. Note that we ask for the change in population growth, that is the difference in growth of population between two periods. You choose whether to compute differences for two specific years, or differences between five-year or ten-year averages. Explain your preference.

Value: This assignment is worth 15% of the total marks for this unit.