Global Financial Crisis: resources from Intute – by Paul Ayres, Research Officer, Intute: Social Sciences

With the World Economic Forum about to start in Davos, the latest financial rescue package coming to the aid of the UK car industry and some talk about the end of globalisation, how can you discover the best of web on the global financial crisis?

Intute: Social Sciences offers a collection of about 30,000 hand picked websites that have been evaluated by subject specialists. These resources are specifically aimed at a Higher Education audience, but are generally from the open web therefore acting as a supplement to the type of information that is available through IBSS.

For a topic like the global financial crisis, the Economics section is a good place to start to get an overview of some of the issues. What started as a crisis within the sub-prime mortgage market in America has spread to the worlds of Banks and Banking, International Economics and Macroeconomic Policy, amongst others.

One specific site that provides particularly good commentary on the crisis is Vox – a policy portal from Centre for Economic Policy Research. They have just launched a Global Crisis Debate to bring together economists from around the world to share their analysis, views and perspectives.

The blogosphere has helped shape the debate over the global financial crisis, with academics such as Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman coming to the fore. Sites such as the Economics Roundtable and the Palgrave Econolog, round up the best of the economics blogosphere and can help filter the wheat from the chaff.

However, as the downturn has moved into a full blown recession, so the effects of the crisis have been felt in “the real economy” and therefore beyond the narrow confines of the world of economics – meaning that there are other sections on Intute: Social Sciences that may be of interest.

The Business and Management section includes resources on Globalisation and other issues. While the Sociology section includes websites on Economic Performance and Development and the Statistics and Data section features a range information sources on various economic and financial issues.

One of the advantages of working with the Web is getting to see new trends as they emerge and then responding to them. This means adding keywords and resources so that users find something when they search for items about the credit crunch, even though such terms may not have made it into formal controlled vocabularies yet.

Similarly, the Intute: Social Sciences blog provides news based links to items of interest that can help you keep up to date with the crisis and articles such as 55 Essential Economics Websites that will hopefully be of use even after the current crisis is over.

And in the spirit of “teach a man to fish” the Virtual Training Suite provides a series of tutorials including the Internet Economist, that aim to teach Internet research skills, so that you can start to discover the best of the web yourself, for those times you can’t make it to Intute: Social Sciences – but we hope that you’ll stop by soon.

Guest blog post by: Paul Ayres, Research Officer, Intute: Social Sciences