Dr. Rober Martínez-Espiñeira                                                 

Welcome to our website!

Apart for being quite a lot of fun in itself, a degree in Economics will provide you with marketable skills that should enhance your employability.  Our graduates have gone on to careers in business, finance and banking, law, consulting, academia, teaching, real estate, insurance and actuarial work, economic research and economic analysis as policy advisors in both the public and private sectors.

We also hope to be able to help you develop a passion for economics and new skills to make better personal choices, as well as better understand current affairs. Understanding Economics will allow you to make more meaningful contributions to important, real-world issues.  It will help you understand and contribute a more evidence-based input into such diverse issues as:

• whether regulations, standards, fines or the legal system are the best option to deal with climate change, pollution and other externalities,
• poverty reduction and poverty alleviation policies,
• whether and how an unequal distribution of income is socially acceptable, and how to alter this distribution at the lowest cost,
• economic growth as a means of enhancing societal well-being,
• whether international aid contributes to or constrains economic growth and development,
• whether more competition is better than less and how patents, licences, and the protection of intellectual property contribute to this debate,
• the pros and cons of free trade agreements,
• whether immigration is good for a country and/or good for the immigrants,
• how local and international markets work
• how the banking system works,
• how labour markets work,
• the role of economics in education and health

In sum, Economics will help you understand the real world, by helping you understand how choices are made, what the explicit and implicit trade-offs are in any choice and the opportunity costs of alternative choices.  While Economics will help you understand graphs and how to analyze statistics, it will not tell you what you should think, but rather help you think more systematically about any issue.

We call that "thinking like an economist’’ and we like to think that everyone who wants to make the world a better place should consider it!

Dr. Rober Martínez-Espiñeira