1. Title Page (1 slide) Your first slide should be a title page with a catchy title, your name, the date when it was completed and anything else you think necessary.

2. Outline and Executive Summary (1 slide) This slide is important. It should identify what questions you address. It should also outline your primary purpose in undertaking this research. You should also very briefly summarize your main conclusions/points/results.

3. Choose a Region (1 slide) You will not look at poverty overall in Australia. Instead, you will look at one region or area, and use the Census Community Profile from that area as your data source. Download a relevant Community Profile from: https://www.abs.gov.au/websitedbs/censushome.nsf/home/communityprofiles?opendocume nt&navpos=230 In the "Enter a location" box, choose a large area like a State (e.g. Victoria, Queensland, NSW, etc.), or main city (e.g. Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, etc.). The data you need to use is not available in every location (especially the smaller ones like a suburb). Download the file called "Time Series Profile" for the area you have chosen. If there is not a "Time Series Profile", choose a different area until you find one that has this file. In your slides outline what region you have chosen, what sort of region it is and perhaps why you chose it.

4. Describe the Region (up to 3 slides) Once you have the Time Series Profile for your selected location, you can explore the characteristics of the population of that location. It may be useful to compare it with the Australian population as a whole (the TSP_0 file available on the Moodle site has the equivalent data for the whole of Australia). You can extract out a few simple facts about the population of your area using some of the tables available in the file. Don't spend too long on this: just produce a couple of slides telling us about things that might be relevant to the topic of income and poverty. Note that this file includes comparable information across the three most recent censuses (2006, 2011 and 2016). Make sure at least one of your pieces of background information includes a comparison across the 3 censuses, to see if there is an interesting trend there. Examples of some of the features of the community you might like to highlight (don't choose all of these!): Indigenous status, country of birth, language spoken at home, religion, dwelling structure and size, rents, mortgage repayments, assistance needed, labour force participation and occupation, education qualifications, and probably more. Don't discuss incomes here - that is for the next section.

5. Household Incomes (up to 2 slides) In order to look at household poverty among families with children, you need to focus on the tables in your Community profile that show the distribution of incomes. The Tables to work from are titled: Total Family Income (weekly) by number of children for Couple Families (Table T22 usually) Total Family Income (weekly) by number of children for One Parent Families (Table T23 usually) For this section, just work with the most recent Census data from 2016. Do some work to summarise the main information about family income given here. E.g. Show how average incomes for single parent families compare to those with two-parent families. What are the median incomes? How does income vary with the number of children in a household? Show histograms of the distribution of incomes for single and two-parent families. N.B. There are some problems with the data that you will need to address. E.g. Incomes are not exact; they are given in ranges. But to calculate means, you need exact values. Think of a sensible approach to dealing with this problem.

6. Poverty Lines and Poverty Rates (up to 3 slides) The official definition of Poverty involves comparing a household's income with a Poverty Line for that type of household. If the income is below the poverty line, they are counted as "poor". In simple terms, the Poverty Line for Australia is defined as 50% of the median income for households of that type. So, poverty is actually a relative measure in this case. To get more details, access the following report: https://www.acoss.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/ACOSS_Poverty-in-AustraliaReport_Web-Final.pdf This report gives helpful background to the topic of poverty in Australia. You might like to use some of this background in your presentation. You will need to use the values, see Table 2 (p. 21) of this document, to work out poverty lines for families with 1, 2, 3 and 4+ children. This table gives poverty lines for families with no children and two children, but with some thought, you can estimate sensible poverty lines for the other cases. Once poverty lines have been constructed, you next need to use the household income data (section 5) to estimate the proportion of households who are below the poverty line, for each type of household, as well as overall. This set of poverty rates will tell us the extent of poverty in your selected location, and it will show how it varies by household type (number of parents, number of children).

7. A Welfare Model to Eliminate Poverty (up to 2 slides) Designing a welfare system is very complex. In this task, we are doing a simple example, to illustrate some of the ideas. It is not meant to be entirely realistic. We also ignore some of the disincentives that might be created by large scale transfers from "the rich" to "the poor". Given the data set and information you have above, your next task is to construct a social transfer system that, if implemented, would remove poverty. The system will need to be constructed and implemented via a spreadsheet model. The welfare system would involve: A cash transfer to those with incomes below the poverty line, enough to increase their incomes to just above the poverty line. A tax on those with incomes above the poverty line. Normally a tax is taken as a percentage of income above some sensible threshold. Design a simple tax scheme that can be used for this purpose. You will need to set the tax rate(s) so that the amount of tax collected in total equals the amount that will need to be transferred to the poor (we ignore all administrative costs etc). Try Goal Seek (or something similar) in Excel to help with this step. In your presentation slides you can explain the design of the welfare system, and briefly discuss how realistic you think it is. You do not need to outline all the details of your model in the slides, just focus on the main points, assumptions and conclusions. You will also submit your Excel spreadsheet so the details can stay there. Some hints on constructing the spreadsheet model: There are many many ways of putting together a spreadsheet model to meet the objectives above. I do not want to cramp your creativitywe actively encourage creative effortsbut I will outline one approach you might choose to take. I will use the data for Australia to illustrate (you must of course use the data for your area). Consider the screenshot below. This shows the income distribution of one-parent households for the whole of Australia (you want to include two-parent households as well in your model). We know the number of households in each income bracket with the various numbers of children. Identify which of these households are below the poverty line and which are above. Then calculate by how much each household is below the poverty line. Sum this up to calculate the total required funds to bring everyone up to an income level equal to the poverty line. This is how much we need to raise in our tax. Now we need to calculate the tax rate required to raise these funds. We only want to tax the people who are currently above the poverty line. Also, we only want to tax their income that exceeds the poverty line (otherwise the tax might push people who were not in poverty into poverty). First, we need to calculate the amount of income households earn above the poverty line. This is what we can tax. Then we can use Goal Seek (or perhaps Solver) to calculate what the tax rate should be so that we raise the right amount of revenue. This is the answer you are after. A couple of points to note about this approach: We have proposed an approach with a constant tax rate on all income above the poverty line. You might want to think about what this means? Most income taxes are constructed such that those that earn more pay a higher proportional rate. Does the approach you have implemented have this feature, could it, should it? In your self-reflection and conclusion slides (see below) think about the answer you have come up with. Is this a big number or a small number, do you think Australians would be willing to pay this to eliminate poverty, how does it compare with your expectations? Some of the Excel formulas that will be particularly useful here will be: SUM(), SUMPRODUCT().

8. Conclusions (1 slide) On this slide briefly summarize your main conclusions. You may also want to talk about any weaknesses of your model and assumptions, e.g. were there any assumptions that you made which might not be very realistic.