Doing Economics is a unique, freely available resource for learning a valuable array of data handling, software, and statistical skills that will be transferable to a range of courses and to the workplace.

Its 12 projects relate to key chapters in both Economy, Society, and Public Policy and The Economy but they can be used alongside other courses or for self-study.

Each project gives students the opportunity to gain hands-on experience with real-world data, and produce their own reports. They use step-by-step instructions, plus a combination of curated data sets and publicly available data to investigate a topic, whether it’s the effect of a sugar tax, measuring wellbeing or inequality, or analysing climate change data.

Readers can choose whether they want to tackle the tasks by using either a spreadsheet software (Excel or Google Sheets) or the statistical programming language R. We do not expect readers to have deep prior working knowledge of either but they need to have a willingness to learn these practical skills. Readers will be guided through the data handling and statistical tasks with step-by-step instructions, gaining valuable workplace skills.