SIP Idea

One SIP study that would have publicly-available data could be to assess the internation trade and tariff profiles. The statistics would be provided by the WTO and the World Bank. A good topic to study would be how free trade affects countries or something along the same lines. The methodology in gathering data would be to compare nations who are members of the WTO, i.e. those nations which comply with the WTO trading regulations to countries that are not members of the WTO. Of course those nations within the WTO are called free trade nations, however this can be taken with a pinch of salt as there are a lot of policies which continue to make free multilateral trading difficult. an example of this would be government subsidizing their domestic companies. Hypothesis testing can be carried out by comparing the data collected yearly or to see if there is significant differences in trading between economically developed nations and less economically developed nations.

Resources: http://www.wto.org/english/res_e/statis_e/statis_e.htm;
http://econ.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTDEC/0,,menuPK:476823~pagePK:64165236~piPK:64165141~theSitePK:469372,00.html

Another possible study would be to see how a typical household is affected by the new national health insurance in Kalamazoo. The study would mainly measure the differences in spending on medication before and after the health bill has come into affect. This would be interesting as one could see the trends in pharmaceutical consumption. To obtain the data, I would perform a sample survey in each of the Kalamazoo neighborhoods at random, perhaps 10 household in each neighborhood. To see if there are statistically significant data I could hypothesis test by comparing the amounts spent on medication before the health care bill was passed and the amount spent after. Another hypothesis test could be to compare each of the neighborhoods as there would be a difference in income .