Target 2.0 is a competition, challenging students to set the optimum policy to control inflation in the UK economy. It’s open to schools across the country, and is run by The Times and the Bank of England. The name comes from the target in question: keeping headline inflation to 2.0%.
It’s run in three stages – the regional heats, area finals and the national final. In each round, teams go head to head with teams from other schools: they present their view of the economy and what they think the base rate should be to hit the Government-set target. However, since this challenge is about monetary policy in general, and in view of the recent quantitative easing, the students can also tinker with the money supply. The teams are then judged on the quality of their presentation and their reasons behind their choices. Last year, the competition attracted 285 teams. The finalists were invited to visit the Bank of England and meet the Governor, and also got a chance to win some of the £26,000 worth of prize money for their school.
One challenge schools face with the Target 2.0 competition is access to the data on which the decisions are to be based. The Bank of England website provides a list of the relevant economic data but in a flat form – usually a long column of dates with corresponding figures. Therefore it can be difficult for students, already pushed for time with A-level preparation, to wade through all the data, let alone begin to understand the relationships between series. That’s where we can help; we’ve uploaded the data recommended by the Bank to the Timetric site, where you can immediately share, compare, and graph it. Nearly 200 series are here:
http://timetric.com/topic/target-two-point-zero/
What’s more, to make things even easier, we’ve grouped the data into subgroups around specific topics: money/markets, demand/output, labour market, costs and prices and international economy:
http://timetric.com/report/target-2.0-topic-list/
Data from Timetric.