The IB economics IA: how to write a commentary that scores.

If there is one piece of IB economics that quietly decides grades, it is the Internal Assessment. Most students treat it as the thing they will deal with later, after the real work of lectures and past papers. That is exactly backwards. The IA is the part of your grade with the most student control: it is coursework, written over two years, marked against published criteria, with no exam hall clock running. The exams reward you on a single morning. The IA rewards you for getting organised early and writing carefully, which is a far kinder bargain than most students realise.

We teach IB economics as well as A level, and the same teaching philosophy runs through both: the subject looks like a content subject and is marked like a writing one. Nowhere is that truer than in the IA, where a polished, well chosen commentary out scores a rushed, over broad one on the same topic almost every time. This is a practical guide to building each commentary: what the IA actually is, how to choose the article, how to structure the analysis, and the mistakes that quietly cost the most marks.

What the IA is

The Internal Assessment is a portfolio of three commentaries, and both HL and SL students complete it. Each commentary takes a single real world news article and analyses what it describes using economic theory. The article is the raw material; your job is to bring the economics to it, explaining the situation with the right model, the right diagram and a reasoned judgement, rather than simply summarising the news.

Each commentary is short, around 800 words, which is less room than it sounds once you have defined your terms, built a diagram and evaluated. The three commentaries are meant to range across the syllabus and engage the IB's nine key concepts, so you do not write three pieces on the same corner of microeconomics. Treat the portfolio as a set: plan early which parts of the syllabus and which concepts each commentary will cover, so the three together show range rather than repetition.

Because it is coursework rather than an exam, the IA is the part of the grade you have the most control over, and the part most worth starting early. A student who writes the first commentary in the first year, gets it marked, and learns from it, walks into the next two with a method already working. A student who leaves all three for the final term is doing the hardest version of an otherwise generous task.

Choosing the article

Almost everything good or bad about a commentary is decided before you write a word, in the choice of article. The single most common reason a commentary underperforms is a poorly chosen source: too broad, too old, or with too little economics in it to analyse. Spend real time here, because a focused article makes the analysis almost write itself, and a sprawling one fights you the whole way.

A useful test before committing: can you state, in one sentence, the economic concept and the diagram you will use? If yes, the article is focused enough. If you find yourself reaching for three different topics to cover everything in the piece, it is too broad, and you should either narrow your angle to one of them or find a tighter article. Narrow beats wide every time in a commentary.

Structuring the commentary

Once the article is right, a commentary has a recognisable shape. It is not a rigid template to bolt together, but the strong ones almost always do these things, in roughly this order, and 800 words is just enough to do them well if you do not waste any on summary.

Notice how little of that is summary. A common instinct is to spend the first half of the commentary retelling the article. Resist it. The moderator can read the article; what they are marking is the economics you add to it. A single sentence of context is plenty, then move straight into definitions, theory and the diagram. Your words are scarce, so spend them on analysis and evaluation, the parts that earn the marks.

The diagram, the application and the evaluation

The diagram is where a commentary either comes alive or falls flat. A strong commentary draws the relevant model accurately, labels it fully, and then uses it: the prose points at the diagram and explains what a shift, a gap or an area means for the real situation in the article. A weak commentary either has no diagram at all, or pastes one in and never refers to it again. The application is the other half of the same move: name the actual market, the actual policy, the actual figures the article gives you, and tie each to the model, so the commentary could only have been written about this particular article.

And as on the A level side, evaluation is usually where the marks are won or lost. The analysis shows you understand the model; the evaluation shows you can think with it. Weaker commentaries describe and stop. Stronger ones interrogate: under what conditions does this policy work, what does it cost and who bears that cost, what does the model assume that the real world might not deliver, and what happens over a longer horizon.

Read that again. It states a judgement (the tax is conditional), a condition (how responsive demand is), a distributional point (who bears the burden), and a comparison (pairing with subsidies). It introduces no new fact about the article; it weighs what has already been argued. That weighing is evaluation, and a commentary that does it honestly, in its own words, reads completely differently from one that recites a memorised line about advantages and disadvantages.

The moderator can read the article. What they are marking is the economics you bring to it, the diagram that does real work and the evaluation that is genuinely yours.

The key concept, and staying within the word count

The IA is built around the IB's nine key concepts, so each commentary should engage one or more of them deliberately, not as a label dropped in at the end. If your article is about a sugar tax, the natural concepts might be intervention, economic well-being and efficiency; name the concept, then show how your analysis speaks to it. Across the three commentaries, aim to cover a spread of concepts rather than leaning on the same one each time, so the portfolio as a whole shows range.

And then there is the word count, which disciplines everything above. Around 800 words is not many once definitions, a diagram explanation and evaluation are all present, so every sentence has to earn its place. Cut the article summary, cut the throat clearing introduction, cut any sentence that does not analyse, apply or evaluate. Always confirm the exact current word limit against the official IB Economics guide for your session, since the specifics can change, but treat tightness as a virtue regardless: a lean, focused commentary almost always out scores a padded one.

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