Monday, January 09, 2012

Future updates

Apologies for the lack of updates. I created this blog with the intent of providing quality articles rather than short blog posts, however with my final months at college I've been struggling to find the time to do this. I would love to post some of the work I've been doing in economics over the past two years, but with concerns over plagiarism this will have to wait at least until the summer when this is less of a worry and I have the time to edit my portfolio so it is suitable for online.

Economics has been a fantastic subject and I cannot wait to do it at university. I must admit, I took a bit of a gamble taking economics having no experience beforehand, but I've never regretted the decision. Completing my portfolio was sometimes painful (the word count is horrifically short at 650-750 words per piece of work), but it has been really fascinating following news stories I wouldn't otherwise consider, and with an international focus and approach. Before I would never even glance at news like the Chevron-Ecuador dispute (see Time's article for a recent update), but I'm glad I do now since the dispute has been such an interesting story in the fact that neither party will give in. The story just keeps going! And the responsibility of who should correct the market failure is a difficult one to evaluate: do you go from an economic perspective, an environmental perspective or a purely legal one?

As for my classes, I couldn't have studied International Economics at a more interesting time. The euro crisis has provided a perfect backdrop to our work on balance of payments and exchange rates, and it also has me pumped for PPE. One of the problems I often come across in my essays is that they occasionally turn political in the evaluation, and having to restrain myself to just economics is extremely difficult for me when writing about euro crisis. I want to find the underlying political and philosophical issues in the problems of sovereignty, debt and complete integration; it would be heaven if I could just add it to what I already know in economics!

So, what can be expected for the future of this blog? Not much, at least until my exams are over in May. However, I should be spending a month in Saudi afterwards, so expect lots of coverage of my desert adventures then! I will also take a long-needed update on my evaluation of the environmental crime and conflict in the DR Congo, something that I had worked on for a model United Nations last year and had wanted to turn into a research article for this site (to add to what I've learnt from various books since last year). And maybe, just maybe, I'll get round to my impressions of my holiday in Jordan last November.

Just maybe. If I'm nice.

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