IB Economics IA Commentary Portfolio: FAQs

The Economics IA is a portfolio of three 800-word commentaries, each analysing a different real-world news article using one economics unit — microeconomics, macroeconomics, and international economics/global economics (one commentary per unit). It's internally assessed by your teacher, then externally moderated by the IB, worth 20% of the SL grade and 25% of the HL grade.

Exactly three commentaries, no more. Each must come from a different economics unit — one micro, one macro, one covering international or global economics topics — and each must be based on a different published news source, so you can't reuse the same newspaper or website across all three.

Your teacher marks all three commentaries against the five official criteria, then the IB externally moderates a sample from your school to check the marks are consistent with global standards. If moderation adjusts your teacher's marks up or down, the adjustment applies to your whole school's cohort, not just you.

A good article is recent, from a reputable news source, and centred on one clear economic issue you can analyse with a single diagram — not a broad opinion piece touching five topics at once. Look for articles with actual data: prices, quantities, percentages, or policy details you can reference directly.

No. The IB requires each of your three commentaries to be based on a different source — meaning different publications, not just different articles from the same outlet on the same day. Reusing a source, or picking articles that are essentially duplicates of each other's content, breaches the requirements and risks a mark reduction.

Your source article must be published no earlier than a set window before submission — check your school's exact deadline, but as a working rule, articles older than about 12 months before your submission date aren't accepted. Fresher articles also tend to score better on Application, since recent data is easier to verify.

Each commentary is capped at 800 words — this covers your economic analysis and evaluation, not the article summary, diagram labels, or references. Going over the limit means examiners simply stop reading and marking at word 800, so anything after that point earns you nothing.

Structure each commentary around one clear economic concept, one correctly drawn diagram, and a logical chain of reasoning from cause to effect, finishing with a genuine evaluation — a judgement on significance, an alternative viewpoint, or a real limitation, not a bolted-on conclusion paragraph.

Yes — every commentary needs at least one correctly drawn, fully labelled economic diagram directly relevant to the article, and it must be referred to in your written analysis, not just dropped in as decoration. An unlabelled or generic textbook diagram with no link to the article's specific numbers loses marks fast.

The IA portfolio is worth 20% of your final grade at SL and 25% at HL, marked out of 63 total (21 per commentary). Because HL students sit the same three commentaries as SL but the IA carries more weight, HL students genuinely benefit from getting this component right early.

Yes, within limits set by the IB's academic integrity policy — your teacher can give one round of general written or oral feedback on a draft, pointing out weaknesses without rewriting or correcting the work for you. After that feedback, the final version submitted must be entirely your own.

The most common reason is weak Evaluation — students describe the economics correctly but never make a genuine judgement, consider an alternative view, or discuss a real limitation of their analysis. The second most common issue is a diagram that's technically correct but never actually applied to the article's specific figures.