EzyEconomics Weekly 5 - 29th March

It's Friday, which means the Weekly 5 is back in another action packed edition! If anyone is unfamiliar with this regular feature it aims to provide you with a short summary of some of the most significant and interesting stories of the week across and within economies around the world. This helps keep you up to date with the news, whilst at the same time provide you with examples of economic theories and policies in action in the real world.

This week's top 5 Economics stories, as chosen by our EzyEconomics team:

Crash in the Turkish Lira - The Turkish Lira collapsed this week amidst political uncertainty, we discuss the implications of currency runs and what can be done to prevent them.

UK Minimum Wage - The UK is set to have one of the highest minimum wages in the developed world by 2020, we assess the implications that is likely to have on incentives in the labour market as well as UK productivity.

QE Tightening - Successive rounds of QE has left many central bank's balance sheets stacked full of assets and bonds, we assess the economic implications of a central bank selling these assets back to the private sector.

UK Smoking Rates - The UK smoking rate has continued to plummet in the last 5 decades, we assess the economic implications of the latest policy proposals put forward by the British Medical Journal (BMJ) to reduce the adult smoking rate.

Austrian Budget Deficit - The Austrian government has recorded its first budget surplus since 1974, we discuss the role that government budgets play in managing the different phases of the economic cycle.

For each topic, we have designed a question to help your students use the skills they have developed in class and apply them to real-world situations.

Click here to download the full PDF version

Stay tuned for further editions of the Weekly 5 released on Friday's during term time!