Case Studies

Canada’s Pacific Groundfish Trawl Fishery: Ecosystem Conflicts (CC BY)

An open case study by the University of British Columbia that looks at conflicts between British Columbia’s commercial fishing industry and environmental NGOs.

Collections

World Bank Open Knowledge Repository (Various CC licences)

This repository is the largest single source of knowledge on economic development around the world.

Courses

Lectures in Quantitative Economics (CC BY-ND)

This website presents a series of lectures on quantitative economic modelling. It provides a hands-on instruction manual, with all code written in modern, open source programming languages. Topics include algorithms and numerical methods for studying economic problems, related mathematical and statistical concepts, and basics of coding skills and software engineering. The intended audience is upper level undergraduate students and graduate students and researchers in economics, finance and related fields. There are two versions of the website, a Python version and a Julia version.

Open Learning Campus (OLC) (Check individual resources for permissions)

Inspired by the success and credibility of proven approaches to online learning, the OLC is a learning ecosystem that is open, interactive and networked. It leverages the vast knowledge of the World Bank Group (WBG) and its partners and converts it into actionable learning for effective development.

Textbooks

CORE: The Economy (CC BY-NC-ND)

This introductory economics textbook is available in English, French, Italian, Spanish, Finnish, Portuguese, and German. The text focuses on evidence and case studies on the economy, from around the world, and from history. It is motivated by questions—how can we explain what we see? The method is to ask interesting questions first and then to introduce models that help to answer them. Standard tools such as constrained optimization are taught by showing how they give insight into real-world problems.

CORE: Economy, Society, and Public Policy (CC BY-NC-ND)

An economics text that has been specifically designed for students from social science, public policy, business and management, engineering, biology, and other disciplines, who are not economics majors. The book is also being used successfully in courses for economics, business, and public policy majors, as well as in economics modules for Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE), and masters’ courses in Public Policy.

Economics for Life: Real-World Financial Literacy (CC BY-NC)

America has evolved into an ownership society. Home-buying decisions, resource allocation, debt exposure, and financial planning for the future are now left to individuals, many of whom may lack the financial understanding to evaluate and make sound decisions. Economics, with its insistence on quantifying ideas and putting specific quantitative values on all manner of phenomena, can help sort through the questions. Economics for Life: Real-World Financial Literacy is designed to help soon-to-be college graduates start their “real lives” with a better understanding of how to analyze the financial decisions that they will soon have to make. Written in an easy-to-read, conversational style, this textbook will help students learn how to make decisions on saving and investing for retirement, buying a car, buying a home, as well as how to safely navigate the use of debit and credit cards.

The Economics of Food and Agricultural Markets (CC BY-NC)

This book showcases the power of economic principles to explain and predict issues and current events in the food, agricultural, agribusiness, international trade, labor markets, and natural resource sectors. Readers will benefit from a large number of real-world examples and applications of the economic concepts under discussion. The book succinctly introduces economic principles, providing students and instructors with a clear and straightforward approach to learning how a market-based economy functions, and how to use simple economic principles for improved decision making. The principles are applied to timely real-world issues through words, graphs, and simple algebra and calculus. This book is intended for students who study agricultural economics, microeconomics, rural development and/or environmental policy.

Intermediate Microeconomics with Excel (CC BY-SA)

This book is based on the idea that there is a particular framework used by economists to interpret observed reality. This framework has been called the economic way of thinking, the economic approach, and the method of economics.

Models in Microeconomic Theory: Expanded Second Edition (CC BY-NC-ND)

Models in Microeconomic Theory covers basic models in current microeconomic theory. Part I (Chapters 1–7) presents models of an economic agent, discussing abstract models of preferences, choice, and decision making under uncertainty, before turning to models of the consumer, the producer, and monopoly. Part II (Chapters 8–14) introduces the concept of equilibrium, beginning, unconventionally, with the models of the jungle and an economy with indivisible goods, and continuing with models of an exchange economy, equilibrium with rational expectations, and an economy with asymmetric information. Part III (Chapters 15–16) provides an introduction to game theory, covering strategic and extensive games and the concepts of Nash equilibrium and subgame perfect equilibrium. Part IV (Chapters 17–20) gives a taste of the topics of mechanism design, matching, the axiomatic analysis of economic systems, and social choice.

The book focuses on the concepts of model and equilibrium. It states models and results precisely, and provides proofs for all results. It uses only elementary mathematics (with almost no calculus), although many of the proofs involve sustained logical arguments. It includes about 150 exercises.

With its formal but accessible style, this textbook is designed for undergraduate students of microeconomics at intermediate and advanced levels.

Principles of Macroeconomic Literacy (CC BY-SA)

Principles of Macroeconomic Literacy emphasizes basic economic concepts such as value and cost in developing macroeconomic ideas. Students learn concepts involving credit markets, economic planning, and money through short fictional stories in which characters interact in an attempt to make themselves better off. Where many texts put the student in the position of an imagined macroeconomic policy dictator, Principles of Macroeconomic Literacy attempts to make macroeconomics comprehensible to students who live everyday.