The course and the exams

📚The four units

The course is 150 teaching hours at SL and 240 at HL, of which 20 hours go to the internal assessment at both levels. Each unit is organized around real-world issues, such as why markets sometimes fail to deliver what society wants, or why some countries develop faster than others, and exam questions expect you to use real examples.

🔑The nine key concepts

Scarcity, choice, efficiency, equity, economic well-being, sustainability, change, interdependence and intervention. They run through every unit. You need them most for the internal assessment, where each commentary must use a different concept as its lens, but they are also good evaluation tools in essays (“this policy improves efficiency but at a cost to equity…”). See 1.1.

🎓SL or HL

HL is not a separate syllabus. It adds material inside many topics, flagged HL on these pages, and four topics that are HL only in their entirety:

Most of the extra HL material is quantitative: consumer and producer surplus, tax incidence and welfare-loss calculations, revenue and cost data, weighted price indices, Lorenz curves from quintiles, tax calculations, the money multiplier and Keynesian multiplier, comparative advantage, and trade-protection calculations. HL also adds the Phillips curve, sustainable debt, money creation and monetary tools, crowding out, the J-curve and Marshall–Lerner condition, and monetary union. And HL sits a third paper.

📝How you are assessed

Every paper has five minutes’ reading time. Papers 1 and 2 are marked partly with markbands: holistic descriptions of performance in which diagrams, terminology, application, evaluation and (in Paper 1) real-world examples are all judged together. Paper 2 and 3 calculations are marked with analytic markschemes: show your working.

💬Command terms

The command term tells you the depth required. Questions never use a term more demanding than the topic’s assessment objective allows.

📈Diagrams

Diagrams are central to Economics marks. Draw them large, in pencil, with a ruler; label both axes (price and quantity for a market; average price level and real GDP for AD/AS; the price of one currency in terms of another for exchange rates); label every curve and every shift; mark the original and new equilibrium values on the axes; and explain the diagram in your writing. A correct diagram that is never referred to earns little. Every diagram in the syllabus is drawn on these pages, most with numbers so you can check the geometry.

🧭How to use these notes

• Each topic page opens with what you need to be able to do, taken from the syllabus, then the economics, with every required diagram.
• A worked example on each page shows a calculation or an analysis step by step, with a check and the common trap.
• The practice questions include short-answer questions in the style of Paper 2, calculations in the style of Paper 3, and essay questions in the style of Paper 1 with answer plans. Questions tagged with a session (for example “modelled on May 2024 SL Paper 1”) test the same topic, skill and marks as a real question from that session, but the wording and context are ours; the IB’s own papers are available through your school.
• Real-world examples lean on Indonesia and Southeast Asia, since that is where most of our students live, alongside the classic international cases.

🕑A revision plan that works

1. Definitions first. Make a list of every term on the topic pages and learn precise definitions: they are free marks in Paper 2 and the first sentence of every essay.
2. Diagrams from memory. Redraw each required diagram without looking, then check it against the page.
3. Calculations. Work every worked example and calculation question until you can do them quickly (Papers 2 and 3).
4. Examples bank. For each unit, collect three or four real-world examples you can explain in detail, with dates and outcomes.
5. Timed practice. Write Paper 1 answers in 75 minutes and full Paper 2 questions in 105 minutes, then mark them against the markbands on the paper guides.