Economics and Management Studies

Economics and management studies is a pairing that reflects the reality of how organisations operate in the world: neither purely economic nor purely managerial, but shaped by the interplay between markets, incentives, institutions, and the decisions that managers make within them. Economics gives you the analytical tools to understand how markets function, what incentives drive behaviour, and how economic forces shape the environment in which businesses compete. Management studies gives you the frameworks to understand how organisations respond to those forces, how strategy is formed, and how people and resources are directed towards shared goals.

At the University of Sussex, this programme includes a foundation year, a sandwich year in industry, a year abroad, and work placement opportunities, making it one of the most experientially rich business degrees available. The foundation year makes the programme accessible to students who need additional preparation before the main degree. The sandwich year places you within a real organisation, applying your economics and management knowledge to genuine business challenges.

The year abroad gives you an international dimension, while the work placement opportunities build your professional experience further. The full programme including the foundation year extends across five years, providing a comprehensive and practically grounded education.

You will explore questions such as the role of investment within the economy, its influence on the business cycle, and how that economic analysis translates into managerial decision-making, giving you a genuinely integrated perspective on similar issues from two angles. Sussex has strong research traditions in economics and development studies, and the programme benefits from that intellectual depth.

Graduates work in management, finance, consultancy, economic analysis, the public sector, and international organisations. The combination of economic rigour and practical management experience, enriched by placement and international study, is highly competitive in the graduate job market.