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Studying economics provides you with a greater understanding of the world around you. It teaches you how the economy functions, how people make decisions, why an economic crisis occurs and what the different solutions are.

What causes 'credit crunches', and how do their effects spread throughout the economy? What determines the value of Pound Sterling relative to the US Dollar or Euro? How do stock market prices affect asset prices? Financial events are rarely far from headline news.

How can economic ideas and principles help us to understand how organisations work and industries function? What role do economic principles play in management decisions and in the analysis of strategic interactions among businesses and organisations? Unlike conventional management courses, at Essex you analyse the economics of a business or organisation and investigate how they operate and behave.

How do different countries around the world trade, and what systems do they use? How much of an influence do historical events have on the development of international policies? Our course gives you a solid grounding in economics, and has a focus on international areas such as world trade, world economy, international monetary relations and the flow of trade and assets between countries.

How should trade be managed to promote both social welfare and the interests of workers and firms? How should merger policy be managed to balance the interests of merging firms and others that share the industry? How should financial markets and financial instruments be designed to promote economic stability and growth? If your first degree isn't in economics, or your economics training doesn't provide sufficient experience for our MSc courses, MA Economics may be for you.

What will a post COVID-19 world look like? Can you predict when the economy will recover? How will we adapt to overcome the challenges posed by pandemic uncertainty? Economics isn't optional to study right now: it's vital to our future well-being in a post COVID-19 world.

At Essex we push the frontiers of accepted wisdom, critically examining the decisions of individuals, the strategies of firms, and the policies of governments to understand and challenge the standard paradigms of economics. Our popular Masters in Research course (MRes) provides you with a stimulating route into PhD studies, and develops the expert research mind-set required for a high-profile job in finance or business, if you want to work in the private sector after your degree.

For our PhD Economics within ISER, we offer supervision in applied microeconomics and microeconometrics, which should interest you if you plan to use socio-economic survey data in your research.

This course is available for both October and January entry. Our four-year PhD Economics (with research and communication skills) course has been designed to support students who do not have English as a first language.

Our PhD Actuarial Science is a research degree within our School of Mathematics, Statistics and Actuarial Science.