Economics as the APPSC subject papers ask for it — items 1, 2 and 3 of the ten-item subject syllabus, which is Paper-2 for the Assistant Director and Paper-II for the Assistant Statistical Officer. Both papers are objective, so these units aim at being able to do the computation and to state the distinction, rather than at breadth for its own sake.
Equilibrium solved from two linear schedules and checked in both, point elasticity and its link to revenue, a per-unit tax shown falling on the less elastic side, the four market structures, and the theories of interest and profit.
UNIT 2The same GDP computed by production, income and expenditure and shown to agree exactly; the four conversions down to national income; an input-output table whose rows and columns balance; and the agencies that compile the accounts.
UNIT 3The functions of money, M1 to M4 built from one set of components, velocity from the equation of exchange, the credit multiplier traced round by round to its limit, and the quantitative and qualitative instruments of control.
UNIT 4Tax and non-tax revenue, the canons of taxation, the revenue and capital accounts, and all four deficits computed from one budget — each one stripping out something the larger measure includes. Then inflation and the parallel economy.
UNIT 5Comparative advantage, the case for and against protection, a tariff worked through all four of its effects, a balance of payments statement that sums to zero, exchange rate regimes, and the Bretton Woods institutions.
UNIT 6Defining poverty before measuring it, the six types of unemployment, a Gini coefficient computed from quintiles by trapezoids, structural change read from two shares at once, the planning controversies, and the policy levers.
Most of economics at this level is definition and mechanism. Where it is arithmetic, the arithmetic has a property worth using: it has to come out right, and you can tell when it has not.
Each of those is a free check in an examination, and each is the first thing to apply when an answer looks wrong.
The three syllabus items these units answer, as both notifications word them:
1. Economic Concepts: production, consumption and demand; elasticity; market structures and equilibrium; price determination; national income and its determinants; rate of interest and profit; money and money supply; banks and credit creation; the central bank; price level and inflation; public finance.
2. International Economics: free trade and protection; balance of payments; exchange rates; the international monetary system and Bretton Woods; the IMF and the World Bank; sources of growth.
3. Indian Economics: population; poverty, unemployment and inequality; rural–urban disparities; foreign trade and external debt; inflation and the parallel economy; fiscal deficit; sectoral trends and regional disparities; economic planning and NITI Aayog; fiscal, monetary, industry, trade and agricultural policies.
The APPSC map grades every one of those lines against these pages. Unit 2 also answers two lines of the Indian Statistical Service syllabus — national accounts, and the methods of estimating national income including inter-sectoral flows and the role of the CSO — which is why it is the longest unit here.
Two topics the syllabus lists under economics are taught on this site as statistics, and these units link to them rather than repeating them: demand analysis and elasticities, and index numbers, which is how inflation is actually measured.