Teaching
Danny Quah is a Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) who uses international macroeconomic data with undergraduates (in a course titled Economics in Public Policy) and with taught postgraduates (in a macroeconomics course). He also teaches a new LSE course for first-year students called Understanding the Causes of Things, which transcends any one single discipline and develops statistical literacy.
Quah says using UK Data Service data “helps [my students] understand the theories that they learn, and the most important thing is that it helps them engage with the real world very quickly, so they’re not studying something in the abstract but they can see these things happening in the real world.” He recognises the importance of continuing to visit external websites, such as the World Bank’s, regularly for updates and information but said that the UK Data Service brings great value to him as a teacher and researcher as it has “made these data available in an easily accessible and consistent format, and it’s very easy to find what I need to by going to the UK Data Service.”
For the taught MSc in Macroeconomics he teaches the module on economic growth, using facts about growth from across different countries in the world to support the theories and mathematical models that students will read about in the literature. The first few weeks of the course are data-driven. He uses statistical data from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators (WDI) which cover 200 countries, and also the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) Direction of Trade Statistics (DOTS).
He teaches it as a substantive content course rather than as a methods course. “I get students to learn facts about the world” he says, “my goal is to try to get them to think about the world, think about the global economy. I have consciously stayed away from looking at just the United States or just the United Kingdom or just Western Europe.”
Quah also teaches a new undergraduate course, Economics in Public Policy, which is running for the first time this year and that touches on issues such as global climate change, causes of the global financial crisis and the behaviour of different economies afterwards, the European sovereign debt crisis, and changing perceptions of different parts of the world towards Asia. He primarily uses the World Bank’s WDI and IMF’s Balance of Payments Statistics (BOPS) from the UK Data Service and some carbon footprints data from the World Bank and he supplements these with reports from, for example, Transatlantic Trends.
He says it’s difficult to get postgraduates to use data themselves in exercises due to insufficient time in their schedules, but his lessons are full of slides developed around the datasets. He is currently exploring exercises for undergraduates to enable them to use the data itself in the classroom in the Economics in Public Policy course.
He speaks passionately about the need for students to understand economic problems not just in a single part of the world but in an interconnected global context. The Economics in Public Policy course has been developed partly from Professor Quah’s experience running a LSE-Peking University summer school course for three years, and this new course has taken at least three months to prepare.
His new first-year course, Understanding the Causes of Things, was developed following results from student surveys. He teaches a module on the global financial crisis in which students will use data on current account imbalances across the world as part of their exercise. He recognises the value in sharing this type of experience more widely so others can share good academic practice, and the data-driven exercises that are being trialled could potentially be shared in the future.
So far Quah has not found any barriers to using data in the classroom but is aware that this may change as more students are being required to use data in their studies. He commented that with the UK Data Service “there’s easy access to the data, it downloads into a spread sheet format, and students simply have to manipulate that,” meaning that undergraduate students can do everything they need to in an Excel spreadsheet.