The Department of Economics is composed of faculty holding PhD degrees from leading American and European universities. Its senior members have previously developed their careers at British Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, University of Southampton, Bocconi, Queen Mary University, Autonomous University of Barcelona, University Paris 1, and UCLouvain. Faculty members publish regularly their research in top journals including American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Review of Economic Studies, the Review of Economics and Statistics, International Economic Review, Journal of International Economics, Journal of Economic Theory, Economic Theory, and Games and Economic Behavior.

The department is one of the biggest at SSH, and offers both a bachelor degree and a master degree, with curricula covering most mainstream fields in economics. We regularly place our students into prestigious Master and Ph.D. programs, including MIT-Sloan, NYU, University of Winsconsin-Madison, Columbia, the University of Washington at Seattle, Duke, Johns Hopkins University, and University College London. Each year our best students have also the opportunity to visit our partner, the Department of Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Our alumni are also sought for and hired by top companies in Kazakhstan.