Simple Economic Graphs?

[CrazyDesi]

Hey, I am just starting out on my economics minor. Does any one know any simple economic programs? I need something that doesn't require too much knowledge before hand.

[kaspar_silas]

What do you mean by a simple economics program what do you need it to do?

[CrazyDesi]

Just supply and demand, production possibilities graphs, some plotting, etc.

[MarblePanther]

I don't know any economic programs, but here are some graphing, vector, plotting, etc... programs:

http://www.topology.org/soft/plot.html

[kaspar_silas]

Sounds like your after sometime for pretty simple analysis and plotting. Chances are gnumeric/openoffice (calc) can do what you want (they are MS Excel clone).

Both are very easy to pick up and you can google anything you can't work out.

Plus gnumeric can be used with R (the programming language) functions. R has lots of free online libraries to do whatever analysis you could wish. So if you get really into economics you can do research level analysis whilst having lovely buttons for pop up graphs.

Alternatively you might want to look at Octave, Sage or SciLab all of which have hundreds of tutorials. No doubt some of these tuts cove exactly what you want.

Enjoy

[Pellervo Kässi]

Just supply and demand, production possibilities graphs, some plotting, etc.

During my own studies I've found Gnumerics the most comprehensive spreadsheet out there. In case you need to improve your graphs beyond its capabilities I recommed installing also Incscape (for vector-image-manipulation). Gnumerics has also quie good LP-solver for management science-problems.

For numerical programming / economic simulation I have used Octave (open counterpart for matlab) and Python.

For econometrics I've been using R and for some smaller econometric tasks Gretl (quite nice gui statistical program) and spreadsheets.

Both R and Octave use GnuPlot for plotting.

If your department uses Give for econometrics, you can have its command-line version Ox for linux also.

And one should not forget latex for publishing your work. There are a lot of latex-related discussions on this board.