VAT 2013

For those interested in a bit of clarification about how the VAT will work next year, check this.

Chicken Legs

When teaching Open Economy in my Intermediate Macroeconomics class, I like to use the scenario of Chicken legs import restriction as an example of a trade restriction. The example seemed a bit silly, but helped to  lighten the atmosphere. It seems now that the scenario isn't so silly after all. Parliament is considering banning the importation of chicken legs in the near future. You can read the story here.

Senior Secondary School Attributes

I am currently working on a paper titled, The Determinants of Student Performance at the Business School (of the University of The Gambia): A Multilevel Analysis. The study requires attributes of the senior secondary schools that student at the School went to. I have tried to get the data for the past year but with little success.  It seems even Basic Education do not have the data I am looking for. Specifically I would like to know the number of teachers and students certain senior secondary schools have. If there's anyone who has information on a schools(s), I would be grateful if they could download the questionnaire below, fill it and mail it to yayasjallow@live.com.

http://www.mediafire.com/view/?6i27hac6pfj4jxw

For those student who were not able to take part in the survey, I have attached a link to the student questionnaire below. As above, download, fill it and mail it to yayasjallow@live.com.

http://www.mediafire.com/view/?hg076mo229l1lcy

Thank you in advance.

Ramadan as a Shift in Demand

In life there are many contradictions, but none more so than that of Ramadan. The month of Ramadan should be the month Gambians consume the least amount of food and therefore demand less food than any other month of the year. What we actually see is that Gambians consume more food on this month than in any other month of the year. Why? Maybe someone should do a study on that.

Anecdotal evidence shows that Gambians increase their purchase of rice, sugar, beef and vegetable oil during Ramadan. The average household which buys these items retail - in small quantities - during the course of the year starts to buy in bulk – bags and drums – during the month of Ramadan.

In economic theory, we call this an outward shift in the demand curve. What this means is that during this month, Gambians more food at the given price level than they previously did. The result is similar to what we saw in figure 3.8. if Gambians increase their demand for food during  the month of Ramadan, the result is an increase in the price level and the amount of food sold (in this case, rice, beef, maize, sugar and vegetable oils).

Table 3.12 shows the price changes for rice, maize and beef a month before Ramadan and during the month of Ramadan for the years 2009, 2010 and 2011. For all three goods, we see a jump in their prices during the month of Ramadan; this holds for all three years for 7 of the nine cases.

From now on, you should look at Ramadan as not only the month of fasting, but also as the month of an outward shift in the demand for basic food.

Table 3.12 Changes in the price of food (per Kg) before and during Ramadan

	2011		2010		2009
	Before	During	Before	During	Before	During
Rice (imported)	16	19	15	16	15	15
Beef	70	90	60	70	60	78
Maize	16	17	14	14	16	17

The post above is an excerpt from my upcoming textbook for Principles of Economics 1 taken at the University of The Gambia. The Book will hopefully be out by January 2013 for the start of the new semester.

New links for students

A useful link for economics students taking my Intermediate Macro class

http://blog-imfdirect.imf.org/2012/05/20/economics-new-links-for-students-from-the-imf/

Financial Crises: A Summary

Read this piece online by Rag Rajan about the causes of the financial crisis and possible solutions. For those who have read about this topic before, there wont be anything very new on it, but for those who have yet to read on the topic, its a good summary of the past 6 years.

Below is the link to the paper.

http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/raghuram.rajan/research/papers/FA%20May%202012.pdf