[DannyOcean_]

I'm an econ undergrad and I've already done an independent research project for class credit about something like this. Here's how my study went.

Lots of politicians and talking heads like to talk about third world poverty. Etc etc etc, they make a lot of unsubstantiated claims, like "the level of freedom needs to be higher to grow economically", or "without X level of average education, the economy will never grow", etc.

I'll call them 'soft' variables. Do they actually, empirically correlate to Third World GDP per capita increases?

I analyzed about 15 years worth of data for variables like education level, healthcare levels, political corruption, economic freedom, population growth rate, etc etc etc etc, and then did some fairly simple stat to see if there were correlations.

End result: Some did, some didn't, and none were that strong at all. Not very exciting.

But yeah, these ideas aren't that hard to come up with. gimme one night of sleep (i'm hitting the sack now), and i'll think of a few good ones.