According to the World Bank, Somalia has a mere gross domestic product (GDP) per capita of $309 USD, as compared to the $63,500 of the United States. The negative impacts of terrorists, government corruption, and poverty/famine have left Somalia a war-torn country battling a 30-year civil war. Due to this, foreign countries have become reluctant to provide aid. Fortunately, there has been some viable potential for economic growth through partnership of Non-government Organizations (NGOs) and promoting civic engagement. Recently, returnees and Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), who were forced to flee the country due to war and economic instability, have returned and partnered with government officials to take an initiative to improve the country's well-being. The question this report seeks to answer is what methods can be applied to solve Somalia's economic dilemma? Economists know the most important factors that determine a country’s well-being are education, infrastructure, human capital, and literacy rate to name a few. To gain better insight into each of these categories, I compared case studies of the economic driving factors of now industrially advanced countries. Countries like South Korea and Singapore who once experienced economic depravity, I then compared those economic factors against Somalia’s economy. I have found that from an economic standpoint, Somalia should focus on free or low-cost education for the masses, enabling international trade through specialization, and improving productivity per citizen through supplying more jobs.

Chokepoints are strategic, narrow passages that connect two large areas to one another. When it comes to maritime trade, these are typically straits or canals that see high volumes of traffic because of their optimal location. In March 2021, due to a strong wind, a large container ship called the Ever Given blocked the Suez Canal, a narrow trading waterway (a maritime chokepoint) that essentially connects Europe and Asia, while also handling approximately 12% of global trade. The blockage resulted in 9.6 billion dollars of goods and services to be delayed. Furthermore, it worsened the existing supply chain constraints that were caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Nonetheless, this event displayed how reliant or dependent international trade is on a chokepoint and showed how easily the whole process can be disrupted because of an incident that could be considered by many as insignificant. This paper is an event study of the Ever Given blockage, which aims to see how it has impacted volume of trade between countries that are situated on either side of the Suez Canal. Using a gravity model of trade, I examine and compare the effect that the event had on the volume of trade of various countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea, with Saudi Arabia on the Asian side of the canal. The broader ambition of this paper is to stress the economic reliance of international trade, in terms of volume of trade, on major chokepoints in order to motivate us to find, create and develop alternative trading waterways that could be used at the event of future disruptions at strategic chokepoints.

While many fields of study, such as psychology and sociology, have long offered various investigations and explanations of crime, starting in the latter half of the Twentieth Century, economists have begun attempting to understand crime through an economics lens. Our research has furthered this inquiry by looking at how crime rates are driven by changes in compensation for legal work as affected by changes in state income taxes. Specifically, we examined how a four-year long increase in Illinois’s flat income tax that began in 2011 affected crime rates in the state in comparison to crime rates in similar states and nationally as well. We used a difference-in-difference analysis to understand how the change in state income tax rates led to a change in crime rates in our treatment state, Illinois, when compared to those states that represent our control group. Using data on tax rates levied in each state, crime data aggregated by the federal government, and other publicly available data to inform our analysis, we have an idea of the relationship between changes in state-level income taxation and changes in crime rates as observed in Illinois. We expect that an increase in taxation will put upward pressure on crime rates in Illinois as the returns to legal work will be comparatively decreased. The hope for such work is not necessarily to inform the conversation surrounding appropriate tax rates but to contribute to an economic model of crime. Such models empower policymakers to combat crime not as a function of some base flaw in a criminal’s humanity or cognition, but as the outcome of some malleable analysis of personal costs and benefits.

In the last two decades, Chinese state lenders have been responsible for $153 billion in loans to African countries. Acknowledging assertions in the literature that this lending has had tangible negative effects on debt sustainability in several of those African countries, my research project analyzes the effectiveness of this lending in improving welfare through the financing of energy projects. This represents a first step in answering the broader question of whether official Chinese lending to African nations, in its current state, is worth the accompanying risks.

Combining data from Horn, Reinhart, and Trebesch (2021), William & Mary's AidData Initiative, and other macro-level datasets on national electrification, I build a comprehensive picture of Chinese lending to African energy generation projects, as well as the long-term success of those projects and their effects on national energy outcomes. My analysis will be based in part on descriptive statistics generated from my dataset and in part on an econometric analysis run on the dataset that factors in costs, energy output, and national debt and labor metrics.

This research is expected to yield the result that while Chinese investment is largely effective and prioritizes sustainable energy generation projects, opportunities exist for more accommodative lending practices and greater domestic labor involvement in project implementations.