School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg
MSc in Economics
Gothenburg, Sweden
MSc
DURATION
2 years
LANGUAGES
English
PACE
Full time
APPLICATION DEADLINE
EARLIEST START DATE
Sep 2026
STUDY FORMAT
On-Campus
Key Summary
The master’s programme in Economics combines advanced analytical tools with policy applications. As an economics student at the University of Gothenburg, you will meet knowledgeable and dedicated teachers and classmates from all around the world. During the two years, you will develop your knowledge to a new level, and almost all our graduates now hold advanced positions where they make use of the skills they achieved during their studies.
Economics helps you analyze societal issues and enables you to offer advice in both policy and corporate contexts. From big questions such as climate change and world poverty, to how competitiveness affects a firm’s profitability, to how people would alter their behaviour after a tax cut, economics is highly relevant for many issues in society.
A broad and balanced program
Our programme balances a rigorous theoretical education and strong research connections with opportunities to learn a vocational skillset during applied courses and internships. You will develop institutional knowledge and practical tools to analyze common economic problems in markets and organizations, including issues such as taxes, externalities, public goods, competition, and information problems. Our programme provides a particular opportunity to focus on sustainability, and our collaboration with Chalmers University of Technology, also in Gothenburg, allows you to take sustainability courses from disciplines other than pure economics.
Tailor your education to your interests
The programme offers much flexibility. Through a number of elective courses, you can specialize in demanding theoretical courses that prepare you for PhD studies, or choose more applied courses. Our electives present you with several subfields within economics, such as environmental, development, and behavioural economics. The possibility to choose electives outside of economics provides an opportunity to tailor your education to complement your economic skillset with broader
expertise in sustainability, statistics, or business. We also offer internship opportunities.
Actively engaged teachers
The department within Economics is ranked among the top 100 in the world and is number 2 in Sweden in terms of research, with teachers actively engaged within and outside the university. This active engagement ensures that our programme corresponds to state-of-the-art research. Additionally, our teachers’ relations with society ensure that the tools they teach are relevant for analysis and decision support in a range of contexts, including private firms, international organizations, and the public sector. Actively using the type of skills you will learn during the programme, our teachers advise multinational pharmaceutical companies on pricing, serve as competition law judges, work with the World Bank, and serve in the IPCC.
International Environment
Economics is an international field, and with that comes an international job market once you have your degree. In our programme, you will meet students and teachers from all over the world, and may gain even more international experience by choosing to go abroad for an exchange semester at any of our many partner universities. A special opportunity is our Double Degree agreements. If you apply for a Double Degree, you will study one year in Gothenburg and one year abroad, receiving a full degree from each university.
The first semester covers the fundamentals of economic analysis and consists of mandatory core courses in Math, Econometrics, and Micro- and Maceoeconomics.
During the second and third semesters, most courses are elective. Our large variety of elective courses provides an opportunity to tailor your education to your particular interest, for example focusing on core economic questions or gaining expertise in sustainability issues. We offer both research-oriented courses and more practice-oriented ones. You can also choose to do an internship with a firm or organization.
The third semester ends with two mandatory courses - Economic Research Process and Applied Econometrics - which prepare you for both for your final thesis and the future job market.
The fourth semester is dedicated to your master´s thesis, where you apply your acquired skills to analyze relevant economic questions and have the opportunity to reflect on the specialization you built throughout previous semesters.
Graduates of the programme receive the degree Master of Science in Economics. You will be prepared to work at a broad range of international organisations, private and public industries with positions as professional economist, financial advisors or project manager.