The past few days in my social studies class, we have been comparing different economies from around the world. To help aid in our conversation about comparasion students have been using the CIA World Factbook. This website provided by the CIA contains a wealth of information about every country around the world. In a few clicks of a button you can unlock information about any country’s economy, education, imports/exports, population, etc…

We used this website as a tool to compare four different countries: US, China, North Korea, and Chad. Students were asked to compare the countries by various economic factors that included everything from population to agriculture. Below is chart of information that was completed by one of my students (Lindsey R.), please feel free to check out here work.

	US (Constitutional Republic)	China (Communist Single-Party State)	North Korea (Socialist Single-Party State)	Chad (Republic)
Population	307,212,123	1,338,612,968	22,665,345	10,329,208
Type of Economy	Free Market	Market	Free Market	Agriculture
Population below poverty line	12%	8%	NA	80%
Unemployment rate	7.2%	4%	NA	NA
Gross Domestic Product – real growth rate	1.1%	9%	3.7%	-0.8%
Inflation rate	3.8%	5.9%	NA	10.3%
Exchange rate per U.S. Dollar	British Pounds/US Dollar: 0.5302             Canadian Dollars/US Dollar: 1.0364            Chinese Yuan/US Dollars: 6.9385          Euros/US Dollars: 0.6827                          Japanese Yen/US Dollars: 103.58	Renminbi Yuan/US Dollar: 6.9385	North Korea Wan/US Dollar: 140	Central Africa/US Dollar: 447.81
Agriculture – products	Wheat, corn, other grains, fruits, vegetables, cotton, beef, pork, poultry, dairy, fish, forest products	rice, wheat, potatoes, corn, peanuts, tea, barley, apples, cotton, oilseed, pork, fish	rice, corn, potatoes, soybeans, cattle, pigs, pork, eggs	cotton, millet, peanuts, rice,potatoes, cattle, sheep, goats, camels
Industries	Petroleum, steel, motor vehicles, aerospace, telecommunications, chemicals, electrons, food processing, consumer goods, lumber, mining	iron, steel, aluminum, coal, machine building, apparel, cement, chemicals, fertilizer, consumer products, food processing, transportation equipment, commercial space launch vehicles	military products, machine building, electric power, chemicals, mining, food processing, tourism	oil, cotton textiles, meatpacking, brewing, soap, cigarettes, construction materials

We will be using this chart in class on Wednesday to take a further look at these numbers and analyze the different economies of these four countries.

Mr. McClung