Welcome to the visual revision hub curated by Kelvin Hong, founder of The Economics Tutor — a leading centre for Economics tuition in Singapore. Every sheet below condenses an entire syllabus topic onto a single page: the mechanism, the diagram, and the evaluation points examiners actually reward.
These are not a substitute for reading. Pairing written explanation with a diagram is one of the best-evidenced revision techniques there is — the two encode differently in memory, so recall in the exam hall has two routes rather than one. Read the notes first to build the causal chain; use the mindmap in the final fortnight to compress it into something you can reconstruct from memory in ninety seconds.
How to use this page: each sheet is tagged with the syllabus it applies to and linked to the matching free Economics notes. Download the sheet, read the note, then close both and try to redraw the framework from scratch. If you cannot, you have found your gap.
Demand and supply, elasticities, market failure, and the theory of the firm. Market structure content is examinable for H2 A-Level and IB HL candidates only.
Every non-price determinant of demand and supply, grouped and paired with the direction of the resulting shift. This is the sheet that fixes the single most costly error in Paper 1: confusing a shift of the curve with a movement along it, which collapses an otherwise sound answer into a bottom-band response.
📥 Download the Demand and Supply factors infographic (PNG) 📖 Read the full Demand and Supply notes
Elasticity is only worth marks when it drives a decision. This mindmap covers the total revenue rule and its use in firm pricing strategy, how the incidence of an indirect tax splits between producer and consumer, why governments tax price-inelastic goods for revenue but need other instruments to change behaviour, and why commodity markets with low PED and low PES suffer violent price swings.
📥 Download the PED & PES applications mindmap (PNG) 📖 Read the full Elasticities notes
Cross elasticity of demand is examinable at H2 A-Level and does not appear in the current IBO Economics guide, so IB candidates can safely skip this one. For H2 A-Level students: how firms use XED to identify substitutes (positive XED) and complements (negative XED), and what the magnitude of the coefficient reveals about the intensity of competitive rivalry. Applications run from pricing and bundling decisions to how competition authorities use XED to define the boundaries of a market.
📥 Download the XED mindmap (PNG) 📖 Read the full Elasticities notes
The most confused pair in market failure. Sets out the two defining properties of a pure public good — non-excludability and non-rivalry — and why together they produce the free-rider problem and complete market failure, against merit goods, which markets do supply but under-provide because of positive externalities and imperfect information. The distinction is not cosmetic: complete and partial market failure call for different policy responses, and examiners mark that discrimination.
📥 Download the Public Goods vs Merit Goods infographic (PNG) 📖 Read the full Market Failure notes
The five sources — technical, managerial, marketing, financial and risk-bearing — with the specific mechanism by which each lowers long-run average cost. Also covers internal diseconomies of scale and why the LRAC curve eventually turns upward. Most often tested as a bridge into market structure: economies of scale are what make some barriers to entry insurmountable.
📥 Download the Internal Economies of Scale infographic (PNG) 📖 Read the full Firms & Market Structure notes
A side-by-side comparison of price, output and both efficiency conditions — P = MC for allocative efficiency, production at minimum average cost for productive efficiency — with the deadweight loss triangle under monopoly clearly located. Crucially, it also carries the counter-arguments: dynamic efficiency from retained supernormal profit, economies of scale in a natural monopoly, and contestability. Those are the evaluation points that separate a descriptive answer from a top-band one.
📥 Download the Perfect Competition vs Monopoly infographic (PNG) 📖 Read the full Firms & Market Structure notes
Why a single firm can supply an entire market at lower average cost than several firms could, driven by very high fixed costs and economies of scale that persist across the whole relevant range of output. Covers why the LRAC curve is still falling where it meets demand, and the regulatory dilemma this creates: marginal cost pricing achieves allocative efficiency but forces the firm into a loss requiring subsidy. Standard applications are utilities, rail and MRT networks, and telecommunications infrastructure.
📥 Download the Natural Monopoly infographic (PNG) 📖 Read the full Firms & Market Structure notes
Separates structural barriers — economies of scale, network effects, control of essential inputs, legal protection — from strategic barriers such as limit pricing, predatory pricing and brand proliferation. The point examiners look for is that barriers, not current market share, are what allow supernormal profit to survive into the long run.
📥 Download the Barriers to Entry infographic (PNG) 📖 Read the full Firms & Market Structure notes
A contestable market is defined by the threat of entry, not the number of incumbents. This sheet maps the conditions for perfect contestability, the hit-and-run entry mechanism, and the role of sunk costs as the true barrier. The conclusion students most often miss: a monopolist in a highly contestable market may price close to normal profit despite facing no actual rival — which is precisely why market share alone tells you very little about market power.
📥 Download the Theory of Contestability infographic (JPG) 📖 Read the full Firms & Market Structure notes
Standard of living, inflation, growth, the balance of payments, and the fiscal and supply-side policies used to manage them.
How real GDP per capita is used to measure material standard of living, and every limitation you should be raising in evaluation: it says nothing about distribution, omits non-marketed and household output, ignores the negative externalities generated in producing that output, and captures none of the non-material dimension. Also covers composite and alternative indicators and how to deploy them without simply listing them.
📥 Download the Standard of Living mindmap (PNG) 📖 Read the full Standard of Living notes
Splits cleanly into internal effects — falling real income and purchasing power, arbitrary redistribution from savers to borrowers where inflation is unanticipated and therefore not priced into nominal interest rates, menu and shoe-leather costs, and investment uncertainty from unpredictable returns — and external effects, where a higher relative inflation rate erodes export price competitiveness and worsens the current account. It also makes the point most answers omit: moderate, anticipated inflation is not necessarily harmful, and deflation is often worse.
📥 Download the Consequences of Inflation mindmap (PNG) 📖 Read the full Inflation and Deflation notes
Traces each route to a stronger current account: relative price competitiveness, exchange rate depreciation, income growth among trading partners, and non-price factors such as product quality and productivity. The depreciation section covers the Marshall-Lerner condition, which is examinable for H2 A-Level and IB HL candidates. It closes on the evaluation examiners want — a current account surplus is not automatically desirable, and a deficit financed by inward investment in productive capacity is not automatically a problem.
📥 Download the Balance of Payments infographic (PNG) 📖 Read the full Balance of Payments notes
How governments cut spending and raise taxes to reduce a budget deficit, and the contractionary effect this transmits to aggregate demand through the multiplier. Note that "austerity" is descriptive rather than formal syllabus terminology — write it up as contractionary fiscal policy in your scripts. The evaluation is where the marks sit: austerity imposed during a downturn can depress national income enough to raise the very debt-to-GDP ratio it was meant to reduce, and cuts that fall on infrastructure, education or healthcare damage long-run productive capacity to solve a short-run problem.
📥 Download the Fiscal Austerity infographic (PNG) 📖 Read the full Fiscal Policy notes
Maps the policies that raise labour and total factor productivity — education and skills training, infrastructure investment, R&D incentives, and technology adoption — and how each shifts the LRAS curve rightward to deliver potential growth without generating inflationary pressure. Carries the standard limitations too: long implementation lags, heavy fiscal cost, and returns that are difficult to guarantee.
📥 Download the Productivity infographic (PNG) 📖 Read the full Supply-Side Policy notes
Weighs the benefits — higher material standard of living, employment creation, expanded government revenue for redistribution — against the costs of environmental degradation and resource depletion, widening income inequality, and demand-pull inflation when actual growth outpaces potential. Structured around the sustained, sustainable and inclusive distinction used in the SEAB syllabus; IB candidates should map these onto the equivalent growth-and-development framing in the IBO guide.
📥 Download the Consequences of Economic Growth mindmap (PNG) 📖 Read the full Economic Growth notes
Why countries trade, and why they restrict it. Both the SEAB and IBO syllabuses dedicate a distinct section to the global economy.
Comparative advantage set out properly: it is differences in opportunity cost ratios, not absolute productivity, that determine the pattern of trade, and specialisation on that basis lets both countries consume beyond their individual production possibility curves. The sheet also covers the non-comparative-advantage reasons for trade — differences in factor endowments, economies of scale from a larger market, and consumer demand for variety — plus the restrictive assumptions that limit the theory's real-world reach.
📥 Download the Reasons for Trade mindmap (PNG) 📖 Read the full Comparative Advantage notes
Tariffs, quotas, subsidies to domestic producers and non-tariff barriers, with the distinct welfare effect of each on consumers, producers and government revenue. Sets out the arguments for protection — infant industry, anti-dumping, strategic industries, employment — alongside the counter-arguments, and closes on the two things weaker answers leave out: the risk of retaliation and the efficiency loss from protecting an industry that never becomes competitive.
📥 Download the Protectionism infographic (PNG) 📖 Read the full Protectionism notes
Memorizing infographics is just the first step. To score a distinction, you need to know how to structure your essays and apply evaluation frameworks perfectly.
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