Economics is a social science that seeks to analyze and describe the production, distribution, and consumption of wealth. The word "economics" is from the Greek nomos" target="_blank" >^*, "custom, law," and hence means "household management." "management of the state." An economist is a person using economic concepts and data in the course of employment, or someone who has earned a university degree in the subject.

The classic brief definition of economics, set out by Lionel Robbins in 1932, is "the science which studies human behavior as a relation between scarce means having alternative uses." Briefer yet is "the study of how people seek to satisfy needs and wants." Absent scarcity and alternative uses, there is no economic problem.Economics can also be defined as the study of "The financial aspects of human behaviour."

The subject has two broad branches: microeconomics, where the unit of analysis is the individual agent, such as a household, firm (economics jargon for a "business"), or government department, and macroeconomics, where the unit of analysis is the nation state. Another division of the subject distinguishes positive economics, which seeks to predict and explain economic phenomena, from normative economics, which orders choices and actions by some criterion; such orderings necessarily involve subjective value judgments.