Statistics Coursework
Topic: Wealth of countries:
I am going to study the wealth of countries in the world (GDP) and what affects this. In today’s world there is a lot of difference in rich and poor countries and I am going to do my coursework on this topic. I will investigate 3 hypotheses. I’ll use secondary data on GDP from sources such as the World Bank.
Hypothesis 1: Countries with a higher Index of Economic Freedom have a higher GDP per capita.
Hypothesis 2: Countries in the Northern Hemisphere have a higher GDP per capita on average than countries in the Southern Hemisphere.
Hypothesis 3: On average the GDP of countries today are higher than they were 5 years ago.
Hypothesis 1: Countries with a higher economic freedom have a higher GDP per Capita
A higher economic freedom will probably mean there is higher standard of living in that country, because countries with a free market economy would be able to make more money. There is an “Index of Economic Freedom”, a measure of economic freedom of different countries that was created by the Wall Street Journal. I will use the most recent data from 2008. GDP per Capita can measure how wealthy the people of a country are on average: It is the money that a country makes divided by the population. I will use the data from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, because their data is reliable.