▪ The assignment should be between 6 and 10 pages long excluding the cover
page, table of contents, list of sources and the appendix.
▪ Font should be Times New Romans and font size should be 12 ▪ 1.5 line spacing and the assignment should be justified Have a table of contents and cover page Due date is: 7 September (The assignment should be submitted on the Moodle site, more information will be provided at a later date). Your assignment should include the following: • Introduction – Background information • Introduce your topic and give a brief background • State the objective or purpose of the assignment • State the contents to follow in your assignment i.e. state the different sections that are in your assignment and what is covered in those sections briefly
• Literature review • Discuss your topic in detail using various literature sources for example, books, journals or any credible internet sources but not Wikipedia, Investopedia, Economics Help, Economics Tutor etc • You basically discuss how your variables are related theoretically
• Methodology • Discuss the method that you are going to use to conduct your analysis as well as your model • In your case you will be using the Least Squares method. Discuss briefly what the method is about • Also develop a model that will be used (Econometric model) stating which variable is dependent (y) and which is independent (x)
• Description of data and descriptive statistics
• Describe the data that you will be using and where you got it from • Discuss your two variables briefly and their measurement e.g. are you using GDP as a growth rate or raw data • Then use Eviews to calculate the descriptive statistics and any graphs and discuss the descriptive statistics as well as the graphs •
• Results - discussion of econometric analysis and results
• Run a regression on Eviews and discuss your results • Your results should be presented in a table • Do not include the Eviews output in the results, that comes in appendix • You should conduct hypothesis testing as well using the p-value
Dependent Variable: INVESTMENT
Method: Least Squares Date: 04/05/16 Time: 12:35 Sample: 1975 2015 Included observations: 41
Variable Coefficient Std. Error t-Statistic Prob.
SAVINGS -10.90408 0.997095 -10.93584 0.0000 C 184156.6 18783.27 9.804290 0.0000
R-squared 0.754087 Mean dependent var 205487.9
Adjusted R-squared 0.747782 S.D. dependent var 238188.2 S.E. of regression 119621.3 Akaike info criterion 26.26960 Sum squared resid 5.58E+11 Schwarz criterion 26.35319 Log likelihood -536.5268 Hannan-Quinn criter. 26.30004 F-statistic 119.5927 Durbin-Watson stat 0.344788 Prob(F-statistic) 0.000000
This Eviews output should come in the appendix and not in your results section, in your results section you should present your results in a table, for example: Table 1: Savings and Investment (Investment as the dependent variable) Dependent variable Investment Included observations: 268 Variable Coefficient Standard error t-statistic p-value C 184156.6 18783.27 9.80 0.000 Savings -10.90 0.997 -10.94 0.000
• Interpret your results and discuss what the R-Squared value means • The section should be about a page • Is your result in line with a priori expectations? • Is your result statistically significant or insignificant
Conclusions • Brief summary of the assignment including a brief discussion of the results • Should be about a page max
List of references • Documents/sources consulted or cited in your work. • Use the Harvard method of referencing
Examples of how to reference in text are as follows:
Financial liberalisation is a process which involves the removal of controls by the government in the financial sector namely, credit controls and interest rate controls (Spratt, 2009). Spratt (2009) defines financial liberalisation as a process which involves the removal of controls by the government in the financial sector namely, credit controls and interest rate controls.
List of sources/references
Ang, J. B. & McKibbin, W.J. 2007. Financial Liberalisation, Financial Sector Development and Growth: Evidence from Malaysia. Journal of Development Economics, 84(1), 215-233. Journal Articles – Names of the authors, title of the paper, Journal name (in italics), volume, issue number in brackets and page numbers
Spratt, S. 2009. Development Finance: Debates, Dogmas and New Directions. London: Routledge. Books – Names of authors, title of the book (in italics), place where the book is published and publisher World Bank, 2014. World Development Indicators. [Online] Available: http://data.worldbank. org. [Accessed 14 July 2014]. Internet sources – Names of the authors, title of the articles etc. Appendix • You present the regression output from Eviews
LINKS TO DATA SOURCES IN SOUTH AFRICA
Statistics South Africa: http://www.statssa.gov.za/publications/publicationsearch.asp
Examples of data available; Motor Trade Industry Reports, Retail Trade Sales, Consumer Price Index, Producer Price Index, Etc Reserve Bank of South Africa: http://www.reservebank.co.za/ [Macroeconomic and financial data such as, interest rates – prime rate and repo rate, exchange rates, loans and advances from the banking industry, etc. Department of Trade and Industry: http://www.thedti.gov.za/econdb/default.asp [Link to an extensive list of sources] Absa Bank: Information/Absa-Publications/Economic-Research" http://www.absa.co.za/absacoza/content.jsp?/Home/ News-&-Market Information/Absa-Publications/Economic-Research [Property research data] World Bank: http://data.worldbank.org International Monetary Fund (IMF): http://www.imf.org
