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The Economy 2.0

The CORE Econ team

An open-access textbook for any first course in economics, whether principles, micro, or macro.

Read The Economy 2.0: Microeconomics Read The Economy 2.0: Macroeconomics Read The Economy 1.0

The Economy 2.0 is a complete introduction to economics and the economy. It’s student-centred and motivated by real-world problems and real-world data. The Economy 1.0, CORE Econ’s original textbook, is still available.

See features across all formats

Interactive questions

Check your understanding with instant feedback and extra guidance.

Interactive charts

Analyse the story behind the data with interactive charts.

Step-by-step figures

Grasp complex ideas by stepping through our simple slidelines.

Videos and transcripts

Engage with economists in action in high-quality video, with transcripts in multiple languages.

Pop-up definitions

Click on key terms to see instant definitions without losing your place.

Bookmarks

Save your place with bookmarks.

Index of concepts

Want to see every place a concept is covered? Use the concept index, whether on the web or in print.

The Economy 2.0

Full table of contents
Building a scaffold with bamboo in Hong Kong.

Preface
We're changing the way economics is taught

Learn more about our mission and what makes The Economy 2.0 a unique textbook.

A giant bushfire burning out of control near Cape Town, South Africa in 2009

Unit 1
Prosperity, inequality, and planetary limits

How capitalism revolutionized the way we live, and how economics attempts to understand this and other economic systems.

Production of made-to-measure suits, at the KuteSmart firm in Shandong, China.

Unit 2
Technology and incentives

How improvements in technology happen, and how they sustain growth in living standards.

Commuters rushing to work across Reuters Square

Unit 3
Doing the best you can: Scarcity, wellbeing, and working hours

How individuals do the best they can within the options available, and how they resolve the trade-off between earnings and free time.

Irrigated Rice Terrace Fields in Yuanyang County, Yunnan Province, China

Unit 4
Strategic interactions and social dilemmas

How, when social dilemmas arise from self-interested behaviour, a combination of social norms, a regard for the wellbeing of others, and appropriate institutions may lead to more desirable social outcomes.

Suffragettes on their way to Boston

Unit 5
The rules of the game: Who gets what and why

How institutions influence the fairness and efficiency of the outcomes that result when people interact in the economy.

Woman working late from home

Unit 6
The firm and its employees

How the interactions among the firm’s owners, managers, and employees influence wages, work, and profits, and how this affects the entire economy.

Shelves full of bottled water for sale in supermarket

Unit 7
The firm and its customers

How a profit-maximizing firm producing a differentiated product interacts with its customers.

People buying vegetables from a vegetable market, Municipal Market, Panaji, North Goa, India

Unit 8
Supply and demand: Markets with many buyers and sellers

How markets work in competitive equilibrium, when all buyers and sellers act as price-takers.

A pawnbroker's building in Detroit, Michigan.

Unit 9
Lenders and borrowers and differences in wealth

How borrowing and lending expand opportunities for mutual gain, and the factors that limit their capacity to accomplish this.

Pacific ocean and plastic waste

Unit 10
Market successes and failures: The societal effects of private decisions

How credit, money, and banks expand opportunities for mutual gain, and the factors that limit their capacity to accomplish this.

Full table of contents
Deda Chicken Processing Plant, Dehui City, Jilin Province, China, 2005.

Unit 1
The supply side of the macroeconomy: Unemployment and real wages

How equilibrium in the economy-wide market for labour determines wages, employment, and the rate of unemployment.

This protest in Niagara Falls, Canada was organized to protest cuts to education being proposed by the government of the province.

Unit 2
Unemployment, wages, and inequality: Supply-side policies and institutions

How differences in institutions, policies, and shocks affect macroeconomic outcomes.

Under construction, West Brunswick, Victoria.

Unit 3
Aggregate demand and the multiplier model

How economies fluctuate between booms and recessions as they are continuously hit by good and bad shocks.

The response of a London eatery to rapidly rising prices in 2023: the sign says 'All you can eat for...', leaving the price blank.

Unit 4
Inflation and unemployment

How fluctuations in aggregate demand and changes on the supply side of the economy affect inflation and unemployment.

The Reserve Bank of New Zealand—a pioneer in inflation-targeting monetary policy.

Unit 5
Macroeconomic policy: Inflation and unemployment

How governments can moderate costly fluctuations in employment and inflation.

An advertisement for SoFi, a fintech personal finance startup, above a busy intersection in New York promotes their mortgage offerings, seen on Sunday, August 27, 2017.

Unit 6
The financial sector: Debt, money, and financial markets

Debt, money, and the financial sector are crucial to the functioning of a modern economy

The obverse of the 2009 Zimbabwe $100 trillion banknote.

Unit 7
Macroeconomic policy in the global economy

How some countries still suffer from high inflation, while many others seek to control it by fixing—or managing—the exchange rate, and all are constrained by global financial markets.

In most of the world black swans were thought not to exist, until 1697, when Europeans first saw them in Australia. The term ‘black swan’ now refers to a possibly cataclysmic event that had previously been thought to be impossible.

Unit 8
Economic dynamics: Financial and environmental crises

How disequilibrium in the economy or the environment may lead to rapid and possibly catastrophic changes in prices or in the climate.

A general view of the Shanghai's financial district of Pudong.

Unit 9
Uneven development on a global scale

Why some countries are rich and others are poor, and how planetary limits affect growth and inequality.

Elections in South Africa.

Unit 10
Government as economic actor: Economics, politics, and public policy

How governments (particularly if democratic) may address inequality, planetary boundaries, and other challenges, and why they may fail to do this.

Formats

Compare features across formats

Free-to-read online

The Economy is free for anyone to read online. Jump to unit 1 now.

Buy the print textbook

If you like to learn on paper, or want a copy for yourself or your library, you can buy the full-colour print edition.

Install the app

Install the free app edition of The Economy 2.0 to read offline. Available for Android devices, Windows desktop and Apple Mac devices.

Download the free ebook

Download the .epub edition of The Economy 2.0 Microeconomics for free to read offline. Also available on Apple Books. The Economy 2.0 Macroeconomics volume will be available in early 2026. Please note that on some epub readers the support for our interactive features will vary. We recommend using Thorium Reader for an optimal experience. The epub file is not Kindle compatible.

Extra instructor & learner resources

See more resources

Test bank

Browse and try over 900 MCQs, and export them for Canvas or Moodle.

Teaching community

Learn from and share with others teaching with CORE.

Visualising global inequality

Explore how income distribution within and between countries has changed over time.

Citation resources

Find out how to accurately cite The Economy 2.0 and its individual units with our citation notes.

Behind the book

We are a cooperative of knowledge producers committed to free digital access to The Economy.

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.

Read more about the book
Thumbnail portrait of Camila Cea

We want to change the way economics is taught. Students in economics all over the world are asking: “Why has the subject of economics become detached from our experience of real life?”

Camila Cea

University of Chile

Thumbnail portrait of Wendy Carlin

New problems now challenge introductory courses: mounting inequalities, climate change, concerns about the future of work, and financial instability. The tools to address them are available, can be accessible, engaging, and coherent to first-year students.

Wendy Carlin

UCL, CORE director

Thumbnail portrait of Samuel Bowles

People today think that economics should be addressing inequality, climate change, instability, the future of work, and innovation. But none of these issues play any substantial role in what our introductory economics students are learning.

Samuel Bowles

Santa Fe Institute, CORE author

See all contributors