Assume that you are an economic consultant hired by an international organization/government to provide your expert advice on economic conditions pertaining to the United States and Ecuador. Your analysis will consist of two separate reports. As an expert, your job is two-fold:

• You are required to analyze any relevant issue using your technical skills. This involves utilizing your knowledge in economic models as well as inspecting and interpreting data.
• You need to communicate your results in an effective way.

The purpose of this exercise is to assess your aptitudes in each domain. You will evaluate the economic conditions in these countries based on the scenarios detailed in each question in this assignment. Your analysis will form the basis for a short report to the international organization/government body summarising your analysis and the associated rationale.

TASKS

• Provide information about how integrated these two countries are with the rest of the world. To do so, you need to look at their trade flows relative to their GDP and calculate openness.
• Provide a visual representation of your findings by plotting a graph that shows the change in openness for these countries over the period between 2003 and 2018.
• Conjecture what would have happened if these countries were not open to trade with the rest of the world by evaluating a hypothetical scenario based on a simple Ricardian model.