Chiara Yates, professor of economics at Southern New Hampshire University, offers advice to aspiring economists navigating their studies and the early stages of their career. The following article first appeared in the INOMICS Handbook 2022. Download the INOMICS Handbook

When it comes to choosing a career path, pragmatic people know that they shouldn't select a job purely based on how interesting they find it. In order to have a stable, long-term career, the job path chosen should be based on the needs of the market as well as the interests and skills of the individual. For this reason, we've rounded up some potential jobs for economists which are highly in demand today.

If you're an economist and you're thinking about working in the field of international economics, you might be wondering what kind of career options are open to you. Here are a few suggestions for jobs which you could do.

We're listed ten of the top employers for economists, to give you some ideas about what jobs might be available to you once you graduate.

While pursuing a graduate degree is undeniably interesting and challenging, tuition fees and other costs associated with studying have been getting higher and higher over the last decade. This has lead to plenty of students questioning whether the expense in terms of time and money that they will have to put into obtaining a graduate degree is worth it. In a difficult job market, students are less willing to take on large debts to finance their study unless they can be reasonably sure that they will get a well-paying job at the end of it.

Before you start considering what crazy lucrative job you are going to get with your economics degree, consider this fact: a lot of rich people don’t like their money. Many complain about not knowing what to do with it all, yet simultaneously having huge anxiety they’ll lose it. They moan about their friends treating them like walking bank accounts, being judged for not looking the part, and no longer being able to visit - how to put it delicately? - less refined establishments. Many work like dogs in jobs they don’t find fulfilling to top up the coffers, only to realise they never have any time to have fun with it. And all jokes aside, some studies suggest that, while earning more money than the national average does improve life satisfaction, once you get past a certain salary threshold, money stops making you any happier. (Depending on where you live, this is around $100,000.)