ATHENA KO ECONOMICS ESSAY COMPETITION
The Economics Department is delighted to announce that Ivy (SFC1) has been awarded first prize in this year's Athena Ko Economics Essay Competition. This SFC prize is kindly donated by Guild member Athena Ko (1997, Beale), a former Economics pupil at CLC, who has gone on to lead a very successful career in Finance in the City of London. Athena attended a lunch in College on 23rd March to meet the winner and SFC economists.
All SFC economists were invited to write a 1,000 word essay, selecting from questions on a range of topics including the usefulness of behavioural economics, the merits of free trade, the difficulties in taxing an internationally-mobile workforce, and the economic case for tidal lagoon systems. These entries were then anonymously judged by the Economics Department, with the top four entries being short-listed to progress to the second stage of the competition - an interview with Ms Jardine-Young, a former economics teacher herself - in which they were quizzed about their submissions and their understanding of economic issues more generally.
Ivy wrote an excellent essay on the usefulness of economic data in helping us to make better predictions about the future, convincingly arguing that whilst regression analysis can give us great insight into past events, ultimately it is the skill and judgement of the person interpreting the data that determines just how informative such data can be.
Congratulations also go to Christabel, Lily and Joyce (all SFC1) for achieving joint second place in the competition. Many thanks also go to all of those SFC economists who participated in the competition, making the judging such a genuinely interesting and challenging process.
Mr P Ratinckx, Head of Economics