BA (Hons) Economics

Study economics for a constantly changing world. This degree offers you formal and rigorous training in economic theory and real world application, and allows you to specialise in a key area of the modern economy.

Today economics means change. New technologies constantly reconfigure how markets work. New emerging countries from around the world reshape the world economy. At Goldsmiths we encourage you to face these new and evolving challenges by thinking outside the box and marrying innovation with tradition.

You’ll cover:

economic analysis
finance and accounting
maths and statistics
microeconomics
macroeconomics
quantitative methods
communication and presentation skills
But your degree does not stop there. You will be given a choice of five minor specialisations. You can choose the one that best suits your interests and future plans. These minor specialisations are:

Communication and Technology
Markets and Organisations
Human Behaviour and Choice
The Creative Impulse
Concepts, Ideas and Perspectives
This choice makes your degree unique. You’ll be given a wide variety of modules from world-leading departments around Goldsmiths for you to explore these topics and develop links that will give you a niche in today’s competitive labour market. Any generic economic degree gives you the training you need to be an economist. But here we provide something on top of that, an understanding of the wider social and business context of economics, so that you will be able to effectively use the economist’s toolbox to solve the problems that you find interesting.

Placements
Because we want to provide you with all the support for your future career you will be given the opportunity to apply for a limited number of placements that the College would source. These occur at the end of your second year and constitute a 15-credit option towards your degree. Placements enhance your CV, bring theory and practical experience together, and help you develop industry contacts.

Students are also able to undertake a work placement or traineeship abroad in a wide variety of organisations. As a student at Goldsmiths, you could receive an Erasmus+ grant for a traineeship at a company, organisation or university in Europe. Find out more about Erasmus+ traineeships.

Study Abroad
Through the Erasmus programme, you can spend half of your second year in a university abroad. You can choose modules there and immerse yourself in a different culture and academic environment, with the option of learning or improving a foreign language.

Why study economics at Goldsmiths?
Goldsmiths is the ideal environment to explore economics in new and imaginative ways informed by our current research. We teach economics in a pluralist way that takes account of the different traditions and schools of thought within economics. We have a very active team of academic economists who publish articles, books and online material for researchers, students and the public. A recent project is Economics: Past, Present and Future, an online resource produced and maintained by Economics at Goldsmiths and used across universities in the UK. On this website, students can find a series of interviews of celebrated economists such as Sheila Dow, Geoff Harcourt, Charles Goodhart, Tony Lawson, Julie Nelson and Ha-Joon Chang.

The Institute of Management Studies is highly interdisciplinary and has academics researching not only in Economics and Political Economy, but also in Consumer Theory, Management, Business Psychology, Strategy, Innovation and Entrepreneurship. The Goldsmiths research community that you will come in contact with is in fact even larger, and includes leading experts from Sociology, Psychology, Computing, Media Studies, History, Politics, Design and other departments teaching optional modules for the BA Economics degree.

Goldsmiths has an active centre for interdisciplinary research in Economics and Political Economy (PERC), which brings celebrated speakers into Goldsmiths from around the world, and also runs an economics seminar series. Through these events, you’ll have access to celebrated economists, business leaders, and policy practitioners.

Economics at Goldsmiths stands on the crossroad of two exceptional gifts given by the Goldsmiths Company to the University of London. One is the College itself, which became a part of the University of London in 1904. The second is the Goldsmiths Library of Economics, bought by the company from HS Foxwell in 1903, and housed, to this day, at the Senate House Library. With more than 70,000 printed books, pamphlets, periodicals, manuscripts, broadsides and proclamations from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century it is, together with the Kress Library at Harvard University, one of the two best-known collections in the world on the history of economics and business.

We are proudly celebrating being part of this tradition by running a third-year module in our BA Economics programme, Manias, Bubbles, Crises and Market Failure. In this module, we discuss past economic crises by utilising the substantial resources of the Goldsmiths library, as the past can give us lessons on how to deal with and overcome future crises.