01 / Reading Guide
Reading Guide
Who this book is for
For students who want their first sustained experience of answering economic questions with data. It works alongside an introductory economics or statistics course and also suits independent readers who need a manageable route from a dataset to a defensible chart, table or empirical comparison.
Prerequisites
Basic percentages, averages and spreadsheet use are enough to begin. Choose one software track; prior programming is not necessary for the spreadsheet route.
What it covers
Projects address issues including climate change, inequality, wellbeing and public health. The same economic investigation can be followed in Excel, Google Sheets, R or Python. The emphasis is on handling and interpreting evidence, with the economic question guiding software work rather than an encyclopedic tour of statistical commands.
How to use it
Start with one question and one software track. Keep an untouched copy of the downloaded data, record cleaning decisions and reproduce a requested figure before changing the presentation. Check units, missing values and the population represented. Write a short explanation of what the figure shows and what it cannot establish, especially when a comparison is being used to suggest causation.
Edition and sources
The CORE Econ title page names Eileen Tipoe and Ralf Becker. The public preface is dated May 2024, which is not treated as a publication date for the entire changing web resource. The free contents, preface and first project were inspected. No print edition or ISBN is inferred from the online book. Publisher or author record Official online resource
