Economics gives you tools for analysing socioeconomic issues

Many highly qualified jobs within both the private and the public sectors require an ability to analyse complex socioeconomic issues. In order to be able to tackle these kinds of tasks, you need a systematic method for collecting data and information, for analysing your hypotheses and for formulating your conclusions. Economics gives you the tools necessary for analysing many important societal issues. In some cases, the best approach may be to use a simplified theoretical model which describes how a certain event may influence individuals or companies, like, for example, which effects a change in the interest rate may be expected to have. In other cases, it may be necessary to use empirical methods. With empirical methods data is analysed in order to examine the effects of an event, for instance examining how a change in the tax code has affected the citizens.

The goal of the courses in economics at Uppsala University is to give our students access to the theoretical and empirical methods necessary for being able to tackle the qualified tasks faced in the daily professional life as an economist. Throughout, we also emphasise the need for having a critical approach when choosing methods as well as interpreting data and results. We also aim to have all of our courses firmly based on current research in the field. These goals are achieved by studying the two main fields in economics – microeconomics (where the focus is on individuals and firms) and macroeconomics (where the focus is on the economy as a whole) – in addition to studies in a number of more specialised fields (e.g. labour economics, public economics and financial economics).