Preface
‘CORE provides access to the very best of modern economics … this is how economics should be introduced to students and how it should be understood by citizens and policymakers of the future.’ — Simon Johnson, 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics co-winner and Professor of Entrepreneurship, MIT Sloan School of Management.
Beatrice Mbinya
Beatrice Mbinya studied economics at the University of Nairobi. Here is what she says:
If you’re here, you’re likely motivated by the pressing problems shaping our world today: inflation, rising inequality, the cost-of-living crisis, and the looming threat of environmental crises. You might be able to name the terms, but do you truly understand the mechanisms that connect them?
Dive in! This is what the best of modern economics can do. It’s an invitation to move beyond defining problems to actively contributing to their solutions.
Mbinya continues, explaining how CORE’s The Economy 2.0: Macroeconomics worked for her:
This course gets you to address real-world challenges by applying evidence and data to your models, helping you see clearly how policy choices, technology, and social power interact to generate either shared prosperity or unhealthy instability.
My own passion for macroeconomics was sparked by a realisation much like the one you may be experiencing now. My understanding was once a collection of fragments; I could define the terms (like GDP or inflation), but lacked the framework to use them to debate and analyse real-world issues. But with CORE everything clicked.
The Economy 2.0 was the intellectual overhaul I desperately needed. The course replaced the fragmented knowledge with a deep, integrated understanding that became the cornerstone of my professional life. It cultivated a capacity for critical analysis and a professional confidence that are defining my career trajectory.
CORE makes it easy to engage actively with the data and empirical methods. Prepare to see the economy not as an abstract, dismal science, but as a complex, comprehensible system. Your transformative intellectual journey starts now.
In over 71 countries, colleges and universities are using CORE’s The Economy. It is a modern teaching resource that addresses today’s most pressing economic problems, such as inequality between and within countries, climate change, financial instability, the future of work, and innovation.
The Economy 2.0: Macroeconomics is a self-contained introduction to macroeconomics for undergraduate students; it is also aimed at students in public policy master’s courses and for those in professional roles who want to update their understanding.
527 institutions across the world are using CORE Econ in instruction.
The most pressing problems of our time
Since we launched CORE in 2013, we have tried an experiment in classrooms around the world. On the first day of their introductory class, we ask students: ‘What is the most pressing problem that economists should address?’
The word clouds below show the responses that students at four universities gave us in 2024 and 2025. The size of the font is proportional to the frequency with which they mentioned the word or phrase.
The most pressing problems that economists should address, according to students at universities in Türkiye, Brazil, Italy, and the UK in 2024 and 2025.
These word clouds demonstrate global themes—with inequality and environmental issues occurring consistently. There is also variation across countries, which highlights local social problems such as the use of natural resources. The more recent ones signal the emergence of inflation and the cost-of-living crisis as pressing problems along with tariffs and artificial intelligence.
Currently, economics has a reputation among the public, the media, and potential students as an abstract subject that is about making money, but is otherwise not engaged with the real world. Yet for most of its history, economics has been about understanding and changing the way the world works, and CORE Econ continues that tradition. Early economists—the mercantilists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for example, or the physiocrats in the years leading up to the French Revolution—were advisers to the rulers of their time.
Today, macroeconomic policymakers, private-sector economists who create platforms for the online economy, economic development advisers, and think tank experts can contribute to making the world a place in which people might flourish in a sustainable environment. This is both the most inspiring calling and the greatest challenge of the discipline.
Updating the introductory paradigm
The economics discipline has made great strides in developing tools that can help us understand, explain, and address the challenges currently facing our world. In this text, you will be introduced to tools and concepts such as strategic interaction (game theory), limited information, principal–agent models, human behaviours and preferences including not only self-interest and risk aversion but also altruism, as well as dynamic processes of change such as creative destruction and instability.
These tools and concepts are used daily by policymakers, business economists, and academic economists, and have become mainstream in the discipline. They are widely taught in PhD programmes, but have only slowly made their way into first-year undergraduate textbooks. Unfortunately, this has often meant that for many students the theoretical constructs encountered in a first economics course are both divorced from the world and are remote from how most practising economists actually think. The Economy provides a new benchmark model that is engaging and coherent and, as a result, accessible to first-year students.
This is why we think the CORE approach to introductory economics has been welcomed by leading economists around the world.
‘This … wonderful book for instructors and students everywhere … covers all the economics that matters today for the economists of tomorrow … from inequality to climate change, from game theory to empirical techniques, state-of-the-art topics and methods.’ — Oriana Bandiera, London School of Economics
‘CORE Econ’s The Economy is a novel combination of analytical rigour and highly motivating applications that engages students in learning how economic models work, and why they are essential for understanding the trajectory of human history and the world around us today.’ — Leah Boustan, Princeton University
‘The best innovation in economic education that I have seen in my career. A smorgasbord of ideas that refresh our old concepts, moving our standard discourse from dismal to light, from a dehumanized science to a spirited vision of the world.’ — Christian Gollier, Toulouse School of Economics
‘This is quite simply the best economics textbook on the market. Unlike most others, The Economy teaches both the tools of the discipline and the way real economies work, making it useful and fun at the same time.’ — Dani Rodrik, Harvard University
‘A brilliant way to introduce students to economics: it combines state-of-the-art economic theory with a big-picture perspective on modern development.’ — Nikolaus Wolf, Humboldt University of Berlin
An emphasis on real-world data concerning real-world problems
Our focus on real-world problems explains why we called this book The Economy rather than Economics, which is the standard title for introductory texts. The Economy makes extensive use of data and cutting-edge empirical research:
- Many of the figures in The Economy have links to the website of our partner Our World in Data (OWiD). You can click on the button below each figure to access the latest data in an interactive format.
- ‘How economists learn from facts’ boxes introduce you to empirical methods in economics and show how those methods can be used to uncover whether a policy had its intended effect.
- The text is also linked to Doing Economics, where you can develop your data analysis and presentation skills in Excel, Google Sheets, R, or Python.
A global commitment: The cooperative production of free knowledge
CORE Econ is a truly global project in two ways: its development spans the world, and it is open to anyone, anywhere, who wants to use it.
Much of our design and interactive features were initiated in Bangalore, India. The open-source platform for our text and online materials was produced in Cape Town, South Africa. Material has been contributed, edited, and reviewed by literally hundreds of scholars. Major authors of our units—contributing their expertise and intellectual property for free—are from 15 countries. Translations of The Economy 2.0 are available in Spanish and in process in Chinese, Korean, and Finnish. For The Economy 1.0, there are Spanish, French, Finnish, Italian, Portuguese, and German versions. An adaptation which introduces topics and features specific to South Asian and low-/middle-income economies—The Economy: A South Asian Perspective—is also available.
CORE Econ makes all of its ebooks and related teaching and learning resources available online through a Creative Commons licence that allows for non-commercial, free use throughout the world. We are a cooperative of knowledge producers committed to free digital access to CORE Econ’s library of resources to help build a global citizenry empowered by the language, facts, and concepts of economics. We want as many people as possible to be able to reason about, and act to address, the challenges of the twenty-first century economy, society, and biosphere. Our hope is that the best of economics can become part of how all citizens understand and seek to address the problems that we confront.
Join the community
If you are a student or an instructor, and you are curious about our approach to economics and its inspiration in recent developments in the discipline, you can find more in the article called ‘Looking forward to economics after The Economy 2.0’.
While the launch of our completed two-volume second edition is a satisfying milestone for us, we are still at the beginning. CORE Econ is not just a book or a course. It is a growing global community of teachers and learners, and we welcome your curiosity, comments, suggestions, and improvements at www.core-econ.org. Join us!
The CORE Econ team
November 2025
