Brief Paper Outline

Criteria for approval of outlineAs mentioned in the syllabus, one of the goals of this course is for you to become familiar withhow to use publicly available data to check facts and satisfy your curiosity about the MiddleEast.The purpose of this assignment is therefore to give you practice testing/illustrating an argumentusing data and graphs. Note that the data pattern you find may not support your originalargument, but this is totally fine. Practice finding appropriate data and graphs to satisfy yourcuriosity and illustrate your thoughts is the goal here.One very important thing to note is that we want to see the effort of collecting data on yourown by checking publicly available data, and making the graphs and tables by yourself.The tables and graphs should not be a copy and paste of an existing article.You do not have to make fancy arguments, but you have to think about what kind of data tablesand graphs can illustrate your arguments and satisfy your curiosity.Bearing the above in mind, an outline should have the following elements.Motivation of the brief paperStatement of your hypothesis/point: the statement has to involve the countries wediscuss in this course.Logical argument of your hypothesis: this can be two to three sentences. Do notwrite long paragraphs.DataData SourceVariable definition: Write down the definition of the variables in your data ifthe variable you are using is not common. Note: When you see a variablein your data, always first check the definition, see if the definition fits intothe measure you have in mind.Data presentation
one scatter plot: specify the x, y variables, inclusion of countries, andproduce one scatter plot. Note that we encourage you to also use otherkinds of graphs, e.g., bar and line graphs, but you must have one scatterplot.The reason you choose to compare the selected countries for certainyears in the graphs you will produce. The comparison level need notbe at the country level. For example, you can also compare sectorswithin a country.Have at least one population weighted average. You can use the weightedaverages to compare one area to another: e.g., Sub-Saharan vsMeditarranean; Middle East vs Latin America. Or you can use populationweighted average to compare a country to the area, e.g., Tunisia vsMediterranean countries