Meeting Basic Needs

These teaching packs are designed for 30-minute (online or offline) sessions that can be included within any lecture or tutorial class. They are designed to be suitable for university students, but could easily be adapted for higher or lower levels. Every month, we will publish at least one exercise that you can use to engage your students with current events. The main aims of these exercises are to give students practice in relating economic ideas to the real world and their own lived experiences.

Newspaper articles or videos are used as the entry point to an economic topic, which is then expanded upon by the instructor before the students are broken into small groups to engage in an activity. This will help students to develop the skills required to work as economists in the real world, and all the materials you need are provided for you. These teaching packs are published as creative commons (CC BY) and can be freely used and adopted.

Throughout 2022 it has become increasingly difficult for people around the world to meet their basic needs – even those who live in relative affluence in the Global North. This 30-minute classroom exercise takes this common recent experience as a starting point for an exploration of the different economic mechanisms and organisations that can be used to provide for people’s basic needs.

The central aim of this session is to give students the understanding that there are many resource coordination and allocation mechanisms operating in the economy. This requires the presentation of different mechanisms, but it is not important for students to be able to perfectly reproduce the details of each.