2.8. Case Study 2: How is Business Over Time?

In this section, we will compare data across the years in order to identify patterns and trends over time. This will help us to analyze data better and make important connections. So far, We have been using the business start-up data set from 2019. In this section, we will use the same data set from 2014. We can use this file to make some comparisons of our data across a span of 5 years.

  1. First, let’s start with a new workbook. We want to get each of the CSV files from the business start-up data loaded into separate sheets. Therefore, you will have one sheet containing 2014 business start-up data, and another sheet containing 2019 business start-up data in the same workbook.

  2. Next, we can create a table on a new sheet with the business start-up rank for each country in each year. You will have the following three columns: country name, 2014 rank, and 2019 rank. Hint: Use VLOOKUP. Some countries did not have their data reported for a variety of reasons. Therefore, we will have #N/A values like in the previous case study.

Next, create a new column, you will use this column to measure the change between the business start-up rank from 2018 and 2014. Then, create a new cell for finding the maximum value of this new column.

As we saw in the previous case study, if we run a function on a column with #N/A values, the function will return #N/A. To handle this problem, we can use the IFERROR function we used before and change all the #N/A values to 0. We can do this by adjusting our subtraction so that our difference gives us 0 when there is an error. We change the calculation to look something like =IFERROR(C2-B2).

Challenge

Let’s use the data we have to learn something new about starting a business in different countries. You can find the annual populations of the countries in the world_countries data we used in the previous section. Import the dataset into a new tab in your sheet. Create two new columns for each year and use appropriate functions (hint: VLOOKUP) to input the population data for both years. Use the population data from 2014 and the one from 2019 to determine which countries (at least 10) had the most significant increase in population over those five years. Is there a correlation between the change in a country’s population and its business start-up ranking?

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