Economics with Social Anthropology

Economics with Social Anthropology is a degree that brings together two disciplines with complementary but quite different approaches to understanding human behaviour and social organisation. Economics provides a rigorous, model-based framework for analysing how individuals, firms, and governments make decisions, how markets allocate resources, and what the consequences of policy choices are. Social anthropology takes a different starting point, examining the full diversity of human societies, the cultural logics that shape behaviour, and the ways in which economic assumptions that seem universal are in fact historically and culturally specific.

Studied together, they offer a genuinely richer picture of how economic life is embedded in social and cultural contexts.

At the University of St Andrews, this four-year full-time programme leads to an MA (Hons) and is built around a structured, cumulative grounding in economic concepts, principles, analysis, and techniques, alongside the ethnographic and theoretical methods that anthropology employs. You will develop analytical and decision-making abilities through training in quantitative and model-based methods, and you will also engage with the ethnographic literature on markets, exchange, gift economies, development, and the social dimensions of economic behaviour. A year abroad is included in the degree, giving you the opportunity to study within a different academic environment and encounter your disciplines from a new perspective.

The combination produces a graduate with both quantitative rigour and interpretive depth, a rare pairing that employers in development, policy, finance, and research increasingly value.

Graduates go on to careers in development organisations, international institutions, policy research, financial services, NGOs, consultancy, journalism, and academia. Postgraduate study in economics, development, anthropology, or international relations is a natural next step for those wishing to specialise or pursue research.