The importance of being relevant:ideas for teaching microeconomics and international trade

One of the biggest issues many of us face in teaching economics to undergraduates is getting them to appreciate the relevance and applicability of economics to everyday issues.  Students who are taking economics courses as a required component of their major (for example International Studies, Business Administration, Social Studies) tend to get lost in the maze of mathematical tools used by economists and have a hard time understanding the relevance of basic economic principles to daily decision making.

This paper will discuss two student-centered projects that aim to highlight the application of economic theory to ‘real-life’ issues.  The projects were developed to mimic the economic ‘investigations’ conducted in the style of two popular books.  The first project revolves around the best-seller Freakonomics by Levitt and Dubner and was assigned to students (from a variety of disciplines) in a microeconomics principles class.  Students read the book in the first part of the term and then designed and conducted their own ‘freakonomics style’ investigation in the second half.  Indirect assessment indicates that the projects helped the students to better understand some of the microeconomic theory that they studied earlier in the term and helped to underscore the relevance of economics.

The second project uses Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy by Pietra Rivoli and was assigned to students in an international trade and finance class.  The project required students to pick a product (like the T-shirt in the book) and to trace its ‘travels’ from origin to the marketplace in order to investigate all the trade-related issues that arise in its journey (trade barriers, subsidies, outsourcing, lobbying etc.).  As assessment of the project was conducted to see if students were better able to appreciate and understand the relevance of some issues in trade theory after completing the project.  The results of the assessment will be reported in this paper as well.