Students in professor Kyle Handley’s class created an economic dashboard that diplomats will use to encourage business operations in the U.S.
In the 2024 spring quarter, students in associate professor Kyle Handley’s class at the UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy (GPS) had a unique assignment: create an online tool that would be used in the real world by the U.S. State Department.
Specifically, students taking Handley’s course, Global Macroeconomic Data Analysis for Public Policy, were tasked with developing a dashboard for U.S. Foreign Service officers, the career civil servants who work at U.S. embassies around the world.
For their final project, students worked in groups to develop widgets on the online dashboard — an assignment that drew upon their understanding of the economic concepts they learned over the quarter, along with their ability to program in the R computer language. The final dashboard automatically updates with real-time data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the U.S. Census Bureau, Yahoo Finance, and other U.S. government and international statistical agencies.
“Econometrics and quantitative methods, while very useful, are often pretty abstract to the average person,” said Julian Verdon, a Master of Public Policy (MPP) ’24 graduate, who was part of the class. “But learning how to make a dashboard where a user can interact with graphs and adjust things themselves — I think it helps bridge that gap.”
To culminate the project, the student groups presented their findings, via Zoom, to Chad P. Bown, the State Department’s chief economist.
Once the website is fully up and running, the students’ work will provide diplomats with historical data on key economic measures. Handley explained that Foreign Service officers might use the dashboard to convince a business executive in another country to expand business operations to the U.S., for example, since it would provide them with key data indicating how the U.S. has economic conditions favorable to commerce.
Using government data as a textbook
This opportunity came about as a result of the Diplomacy Lab program, an initiative the State Department began in 2013 to sort through its massive amounts of data by partnering with top-tier academics, like Handley, to organize it. At the same time, it creates an opportunity for students to learn concepts by doing actual diplomatic and policy work.
Handley said that one class session each week was dedicated to teaching a specific economic concept, such as how to determine the relationship between inflation and interest rates.
Later in the week, though, the traditional lecture gave way to a much more interactive model of learning, one that was based on real-world data: Handley would illustrate these same economic ideas by showing how they appeared in the real-time economic data that was provided by government agencies.
Handley said that the project was an incredible way for students to understand how macroeconomic concepts play out in real life — and also to see firsthand what the most important concepts were for leading officials in government. Instead of just staring at graphs in a textbook, he said that students learned how to get the data themselves, and then use that data to create interactive web applications that demonstrate economic relationships.
“In other versions of the course, I would have to tell students, ‘This is really important!’ and point out how newspapers were covering the material we went over in class,” he said. “But in the process of creating this dashboard, they’ve been able to see the real questions that U.S. government economists, and foreign service officers in embassies around the world, are asking.”
Because of GPS’s unique emphasis on teaching students how to navigate data, Handley said that this course was a perfect fit for the school.
“I honestly don’t think that you could do this anywhere else besides GPS,” he said.
