The School of Economics (SOE) was formally founded in 1988 by expanding SDU’s department of economics. Now SOE is among the leading economics schools in China,with 5 departments,128 faculty members (52 professors,45 associate professor), and over 1,800 fulltime students (1,066 Bachelors, 582 masters, 162 Ph.D.s) including 54 international students from all degrees. In the recent 2017 discipline evaluationlauched by the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China, the discipline of applied economics of Shandong University is ranked A-, among China'sTop 8economics schools.

SOE is the pioneer of internationalization among China’s economics schools.

——It has 39 faculty members with PhD degrees from top universities abroad, accounting for almost 1/3 of total faculty members. Besides, 68 faculty members have extensive one-year overseas research experiences. Theyhave played key roles in reshaping the school in terms of conducting world leading research and distinguished English-taught courses.

——Its innovative researches have been published in top domestic and peer-reviewed international journals, such as Journal of Financial Economics,Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Management Science, Games and Economic Behavior, Journal of Monetary Economics,Journal of Econometrics,Journal of Comparative Economics, Economic Research Journal( in Chinese) and Management World (in Chinese) and it undertakes more than 100 research projects at the national level and provincial level, including National Natural Science Foundation Projects (NSFC), National Social Science Foundation Projects (SSFC), Key Project of Chinese Ministry of Education, and so on.

——It offers more than 40 english-taught courses atundergraduate and postgraduate levels and one excellent "International Experimental Undergraduate Program", which is a special and selective four-year program in Finance, open to both Chinese and international students with all instructions in English. Around a quarter of school graduate students will continue to pursue their master or Ph.D. degrees abroad each year and more than half of them will be admitted by the top 100 universities.

——It has invited Multiple Nobel Prize laureates such as Robert Mundell and James Mirlees to give insightful lectures and seminars to the faculties and students.

——It has held several high-level international conferences, such as‘International Conference of Methods in Internaitonal Finance Network’,‘Economic Organisation and Theory Conference’, ‘Public Economics at the Regional and Local Level’, "International Conference on Antitrust and Competition Policy" and "International Conference on Derivatives and Capital Markets".

——It has established international collaborations with over 20 leading universities such as UC Berkeley, University of Pennsylvania, Cornell University,University of Wisconsin- Madison,University of Edinburgh, University of YorkandUniversity of Queensland with various student mobility and 2+2，3+2, 1+1 dual degrees programs at undergraduate and postgraduate level.