Guidance on your brief paper/statistical exerciseOne of the goals of this course is for you to become familiar with how to use publicly available data to check facts and satisfy your curiosity about the Middle East. The most general database in which you can look for data is World Development Indicators(http://databank.worldbank.org/data/Databases.aspx), but there are lots of other more specific ones such as those in sections IV and VIII of the course outline. Another goal of this course is to learn how to use data as evidence for a point of view. I assigned the brief paper/statistical exercise with these two goals in mind.Because your outline is due at the end of the sixth week of class, you might miss out on some good ideas for topics that are covered later in the course. We suggest that you read the introductions to the later chapters in the textbook, so you can see if there is something covered there that would make an interesting brief paper/statistical exercise.Besides the course material, there are a number of websites that might help you come up with ideas for your assignment:https://erf.org.eg/ The Economic Research Forum, abbreviation ERF, is dedicated to promoting high quality economic research that contributes to inclusive and sustainable development in the ERF region, defined to include the Arab Countries, Iran and Turkey. ERF has an affiliated publication, the Middle East Development Journal. https://www.worldbank.org/en/region/mena The Middle East and North Africa at the World Bank. Scroll down to see Research.https://meeaweb.org/journal The Middle East Economic Association has two journals, the Review of Middle East Economics and Finance and Topics in Middle Eastern and North African Economies. https://www.unescwa.org/ The UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (UN-ESCWA) has many publications. https://carnegieendowment.org/sada/ Sada is an online journal rooted in Carnegies Middle East Program that seeks to foster and enrich debate about key political, economic, and social issues in the Arab world
