The International Economics Olympiad (IEO)

by Medeea Constantinescu, Year 13

The International Economics Olympiad (IEO) is an annual competition in economics organised for students at the secondary school level. It is intended to stimulate students interested in economics, business, and finance by way of creative problem-solving.

This summer, my colleague, Maria Sticlea, and I had the chance to represent Romania in the competition along with three other Romanian students, having passed through several elimination rounds to make the team of five Romanian high school students.

In preparation for this competition, we worked with economic experts from E&Y and the BCR bank, giving us insights to much more practical views, as a stark contrast to the traditionally theoretical economics topics typically discussed in the classroom.

The competition itself was split into three parts: two were individual; the economics exam consisted of a multiple choice questions and 4 essay questions, requiring a confident understanding of A level mathematics and graphical representations, as well as a simulation of real life through a financial game, all of which are proctored.

The last part was a team competition by country, on a real life business case scenario. This year, it was about JD Logistics, a large scale Chinese equivalent of eMAG in Romania. We were supposed to come up with solutions to their efficiency problems in their supply chain and distribution, while keeping in line with their ESGs set in stone. We had to provide a business plan including the calculations relating to the finances, profitability, and efficiency for all the ideas we introduced, such as delivery by drones, to show it is realistic and to be able to compare it to their current production practices. We had 24 hours to produce a presentation and submit it.

Waking up at 7AM to take the metro to my teammate’s house, who I had never met, was definitely a strange experience: due to the time zone difference to China, the submission time was at an inconvenient hour for us. We therefore spent 8AM to 6AM the following day at his house, leaving his house to go home at 6AM , having not slept in 23 hours. Needless to say, when I arrived home I immediately fell asleep on the couch, only to wake up at 10AM, 4 hours later, because at 13:00 , we were presenting the project we had submitted just a few hours before in the first round.

Going against university student teams from other countries, we were sure we were not going to make it through to the final. In fact, I had already started to get dressed to leave the house because I was certain we had been eliminated. Out of curiosity, however, I looked to see who qualified, and it is an understatement to say that all of us were completely shocked when we saw the result- we all thought it was a mistake. We had made it to the final.

I quickly went and changed back into my formal clothes, to join the zoom meeting for the final. Again, we thought other projects were so much better than ours, and especially being the last ones to present and seeing all the amazing presentations from before, team morale was at an all-time low. We managed to pull ourselves together, even though in our opinion the other teams had done a much better and more accurate job than we had.

The judges, who were executives on the board of JD Logistics, then announced the winners: Romania had won 1st place! The score from this round also worked towards the individual final score. Both Maria and I finished in the top 50 contestants, earning a silver medal for our country, and our other teammates all won Bronze .Not only was this a wonderful experience academically, but I can confidently say that the experience of spending 22 hours straight together, with people that were strangers to us then, working closely together in a 8 square metre room, bonded us for life.