Resources

The world is developing in an increasingly digital way. As a result, it’s so much easier to share information. What you find below is a repository of useful stuff I’ve picked up in the last few years. Hopefully it helps someone else too. If you know of any good links to media related to anything below, then post a comment so I can check it out.

Early grade reading

• 2018 Grade 1-3 – isiXhosa-English Bilingual Mathematics Dictionary – Useful dictionary developed by Ingrid Sapire (Wits) for GDE/NECT (also available in Word)

Economics

• Brilliant Chart Suggestions – Thought Starter image. Groups charts by common characteristics.
• Writing in Economics (PhD) – Cochrane
• Econometrics – a wonderfully witty article by Peter Kennedy ‘Sinning in the basement: The 10 commandments of applied econometrics‘ and the reply from Magnus ‘The missing tablet‘ [Kennedy is the author of a ‘Guide to Econometrics‘ which gives an intuitive understanding of otherwise abstract econometric logic – I bought a copy and love it]
• ‘Economical Writing‘ by Deidre McCloskey (formerly Donald!) is the most succinct, readable and well-written book on academic writing in Economics that there is! She is clever, funny, witty, and ever so skillful in the craft of writing. You can find a summary of the book here (by McCloskey herself), and earlier versions of the book released as a journal article here. (This is also quite useful as a handout). Even those who have no interest or background in Economics will find the book useful and interesting – the focus of the book is more writing than economics.

Course-outlines (useful for reading lists):

• Political Economy of African Development – Blattmann (2012)
• Economic Development II (PhD) – Easterly (2010)
• Economic Development II (PhD) – Easterly (2011)
• Development Economics (PhD) – Yale
• MsC Economic Development – Oxford (10/11)
• Development and Growth – LSE (09/10)

STATA

Tutorial-type stuff

• STATA now has a YouTube channel with training videos. See here.
• Introduction to STATA – LSE
• Advanced STATA topics – LSE
• STATA graphics tut – Princeton
• What Statistical Analysis Should I Use? – UCLA (very useful!) – also see their brilliant website
• South Africa Distance Learning Project– Michigan University. STATA + SA Data + teach yourself
• Kernel density curves in STATA – a summary of syntax
• Presentation on how to convert SPSS data to STATA data – usespss command
• (Not STATA) – Analyzing data – GraphPad – even though this is for a specific program, it is still really useful (and good as an introduction).

South Africa

• Meta-analysis of research on Unemployment in South Africa (presentation) by Prof Frederick Fourie. Presented on 7 April 2011 at a SUNseminar

Education

• Presentations on the state of South African education – presented at a policy-workshop on the 28 March 2011. The full report can be found here.

Other useful stuff

• Free and easy to use graphing software – StatPlanet (geographical mapping)
• Best OpenCourseWare materials on the web: MIT OCW – videos, course-notes, course-outlines…check it out, it’s incredible.
• Useful presentation on data-visualization from the guys at MIT

Blogs and Websites

• Deirdre Mccloskey‘s site
• William Easterly‘s site
• The Economist

***As far as I am aware all of the content I’ve put on this page is not copyright protected and is all freely available on the web. Anything else I’ve put up is either my own or with permission of the author. If I have violated any copyright laws by posting an item on here, please send me an email and I’ll take it down.