Topic: The Global Economy and Market Integration

Exercise 1: The Global Supermarket*

This is an adopted and modified version of the student exercise created by Jim Stanford
(2008). It was modified to make it culture appropriate. Collect all your receipts of supermarket
purchase for the week. From the receipt of your purchase in the supermarket, fill out the table
below and answer the succeeding questions after the table. If you purchase more than one
item, add up the total price (In the example, if Cadbury costs P117 per box and you bought 4,
then the amount will be P117x4= 468). To locate where products that you bought in the market
come from, you will look at the labels of each item. If the product is distributed and produced
from different locations, check the area where it is originally produced.

Exercise 1. Supermarket Purchases by Location of Production

Where it was made (check ✓ the location )
No. Value/
National Outside
Item (including the brand) of Amount Nueva Other
Capital the
items (in Peso) Ecija Provinces
Region (NCR) country
Bear Brand Powdered milk 1 50 ✓
Cadbury dairy milk chocolate 4 468 ✓
Lucky Me Pancit Canton 5 65 ✓
Puno Ice cream 1 90 ✓

TOTAL AMOUNT OF ITEMS BOUGHT

- 673 115 90 0 468
(including subtotal per location)
TOTAL NUMBER OF ITEMS BOUGHT
11 - 6 1 0 4
(including subtotal per location)
*Stanford, Jim (2008). A 13-Part Course in Popular Economics, Student Exercise. Retrieved from
http://economicsforeveryone.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Student_exercises_0.pdf last August 29, 2020.

1. Out of the total amount spent in your purchase, what percentage was spent on
imports? Compute using the data in your table. In the given example: (468/673)*100)=
69.54% of the total purchase was spent on imports.
2. Out of the total items bought, show the percentages per location in a pie chart. In the
given example, this is how the pie chart looks like:

National Capitol
Region (NCR)
4.36%
Nueva Ecija

Other Provinces
6.55%

Outside the country

1. 9%
0%

3. Assuming the data in your purchase for this week is the average, what percentage was
spent for imports and locally-produced ones (NCR, Nueva Ecija and other provinces
combined) in a year?

4. In what way do you think globalization affect our consumption and production of goods
and services?