The impacts of Budget 2017

The Chancellor's Budget announcements yesterday give a good opportunity for students to analyse the impacts they might have on different businesses. Here's an idea for a lesson activity for them to do this.

Start with Jonny Clark's excellent interactive activity, over on today's Economics Blog, which will get them thinking about some of the key measures announced in the Budget.

Then give the students a print out of the key measures of the Budget - those from the BBC or the FT are ideal, because the measures are categorised into different types - personal taxes, business taxes, pensions and social care, and so on.

Divide the group into pairs or small groups, and give each group one category of budget measures to consider, and also two 'real life' UK businesses that they are familiar with - one small business, and one major one.

They should make two lists, one of the effects on the small business and one of the impacts on the major business. After a few minutes they should rotate to another set of measures and repeat the exercise, or meet with another small group and share their lists of effects.

After three or four rounds of this, ask the whole group to discuss what they consider to be the most significant (and, perhaps, least significant) of the effects on different scales and types of business, explaining the full cause and effect with a chain of analysis, and justifying their choices. At the end of the lesson, ask the class to vote on which measures they would choose to write about - perhaps two for each scale of business - that they could analyse, using theory from their syllabus that they can use with confidence.

Then follow up with a homework essay in which they have to evaluate the effects of the UK government's 2017 Budget on UK businesses such as... the business names that you gave them at the start of the exercise.