The Economics IA is the easiest 20% to lose — and the easiest 20% to win. After marking just over 400 real IAs across the May and November sessions, here's a pattern: the topic does more work than the writing.
Students arrive at a draft, frantically polish the structure, and miss that the article they picked was never going to support a 7. The opposite happens too — a thoughtful article choice gets a student halfway to a top mark before they write the first sentence.
This post is the shortlist I'd send my own students. Fifteen topic patterns that scored top marks across recent sessions, the live-economy article each was anchored to, and what the examiner saw in them.
How the IA is actually marked
Quick refresher before the list. The Economics IA at HL and SL is three commentaries, 800 words each, each on a current news article. Each commentary is marked on five criteria:
| Criterion | Weight | What examiners actually look for |
|---|---|---|
| A · Diagram | 3 marks | A correctly drawn, fully labelled diagram with a brief, accurate explanation. |
| B · Terminology | 2 marks | Subject-specific terms used precisely. Not "demand went up" — "an outward shift of the demand curve". |
| C · Application & Analysis | 3 marks | Linking general theory to the specific article context. Specific numbers, real firms, real markets. |
| D · Key Concept | 3 marks | The concept is named, defined, and used to drive the analysis. Not bolted on at the end. |
| E · Evaluation | 3 marks | Comparison of stakeholders, recognition of assumptions, short vs long run, magnitude. |
The 14-mark cap matters: students often write a strong A–C and a weak D–E, leaving 5–6 marks on the table. Topic choice predicts E more than anything else.
The four-question test for a winning topic
Before I let a student commit to an article, I run it through these four. If three or more are yes, it's a candidate.
- Is there a clear policy or market intervention? (A tax, subsidy, price control, regulation, exchange rate move, central bank decision.)
- Are there at least three distinct stakeholders? (Producers, consumers, government, foreign producers, a substitute industry.)
- Can I draw at least two diagrams to support it? (One core, one supporting — e.g. a market diagram + a welfare diagram.)
- Does it lend itself to short-run vs long-run analysis, or magnitude debate? ("By how much?", "For how long?", "Compared to what?")
Articles that fail Q1 are the most common mistake — a feature piece on inflation in Argentina without a specific intervention will starve criterion E.
15 IA topics that scored a 7
Microeconomics — Unit 2
1. The UK sugar tax: five years on
Key concept: intervention. The Soft Drinks Industry Levy hit its fifth anniversary, allowing students to evaluate short-term vs long-term producer responses (reformulation), consumer responses (own-price elasticity by income), and government revenue trends. Real numbers were everywhere. Saw two 21/21 across this topic.
2. India's PLI scheme for electronics manufacturing
Key concept: intervention. A subsidy with conditions — perfect for the AS/AD-to-supply-side bridge. Students could draw the subsidy diagram, evaluate the cost-effectiveness, and discuss whether the welfare gains accrued to firms or consumers. Strong evaluations contrasted PLI with the older import-substitution model.
3. Minimum support price (MSP) for rice in Punjab — water-table consequences
Key concept: market failure (negative externalities of production). A high-scoring choice because it links agricultural policy to environmental cost, which gives criterion E enormous range. Students used a Lerner-style intervention diagram and discussed long-run sustainability.
4. Singapore's tiered car COE system
Key concept: scarcity. A live auction-based quota for vehicles. Lent itself to demand-and-supply with a hard supply cap — clean diagram, multiple stakeholder analysis (commuters, public transport users, government, taxi operators), and policy alternatives.
5. The Netherlands' nitrogen-emission cap on dairy farms
Key concept: sustainability. This 2024 policy forced 30% of Dutch dairy farms to reduce or close. Externalities + government failure debate + EU agricultural subsidy interplay. One student got a 7 by integrating short-run producer surplus loss with a long-run social welfare gain — clean evaluation.
Macroeconomics — Unit 3
6. The Reserve Bank of India's repo rate hold (April 2025) — divergence from the Fed
Key concept: interdependence. Independent monetary policy in an open economy — perfect for AD/AS diagrams + exchange-rate analysis. Students could discuss imported inflation, capital flows, and the trade-off between growth and price stability. High-scoring evaluations weighed the inflation-targeting mandate against employment.
7. Japan's exit from negative interest rates — 17 years later
Key concept: economic well-being. Lots to work with: liquidity trap concepts, AD/AS, exchange rate, government debt-servicing implications. The "policy reversal after a generation" angle gave strong short-run vs long-run framing.
8. Argentina's 50% currency devaluation and the chainsaw
Key concept: change. Strong for AD/AS with imported inflation, J-curve, and competing schools of macro thought. Students were able to evaluate against the IMF programme conditionality.
9. The UK's frozen income tax thresholds — fiscal drag
Key concept: equity. A subtle topic that scored well because students used it to explore real vs nominal income, progressive taxation, and the distributional consequences over a five-year freeze. Examiner note: this one rewards careful use of data — students who plotted real wage growth against threshold drag scored highest.
Global Economy — Unit 4
10. India's wheat export ban (May 2022) — three years of consequences
Key concept: intervention. Trade protection diagram, world price vs domestic price, welfare loss to foreign consumers, food-security argument for domestic stakeholders. Three-year hindsight added evaluative depth.
11. The EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM)
Key concept: sustainability. A tariff disguised as a climate policy. Excellent for trade theory + environmental economics + WTO compatibility evaluation. Several 7s used the steel industry as a specific test case.
12. Indonesia's nickel export ban and the EV battery supply chain
Key concept: economic well-being. Resource nationalism + global value chains + downstream industrial policy. Multiple stakeholder analysis at three levels: domestic miners, downstream Indonesian processors, global EV manufacturers.
13. Sri Lanka's IMF programme — two years on
Key concept: equity. Conditionality, currency stabilisation, fiscal consolidation, and the distributional cost of austerity. Strong evaluations explicitly weighed creditor protection against household welfare.
HL-only — Paper 3 territory used in IA
14. India's anti-dumping duty on Chinese solar panels — welfare calculation
Key concept: intervention. HL students who quantified the dead-weight loss and producer surplus shift from published trade-data scored top marks. Best version saw a student compute consumer-surplus loss explicitly using elasticity estimates.
15. Reserve currency status and the Brazil-China yuan settlement deal
Key concept: interdependence. Excellent for HL Paper-3-style thinking around currency reserves, balance-of-payments effects, and seigniorage. One of two 22/22 IAs I marked in 2024.
The five mistakes that kept the rest below 17
Across the same set of IAs, the bottom-scoring ones shared these patterns:
- Article too old. "Current" means within the past 12 months. Anything older needs explicit justification.
- Article too broad. A feature about "global inflation" doesn't anchor specific stakeholders. Pick a single policy, a single market.
- Diagram drawn but not explained. Criterion A explicitly requires explanation, not just labels.
- Key concept tacked on. The concept should drive the analysis from the start. Mentioning "the key concept here is intervention" in the conclusion costs you 2 marks on criterion D.
- Evaluation = listing. Stating "this policy has pros and cons" isn't evaluation. Comparing magnitude, time horizon, or assumptions is.
Want examiner feedback on your IA topic before you start?
If your child is choosing an IA topic right now, we run a free 30-minute review with one of our IB Economics examiners. Bring the article, your key concept, and your initial diagram idea — we'll tell you whether it can carry a 7 before you've spent two weeks writing.
— Shailey