Sustainable development (SD) isbased on the idea that environmental problems must be managed in relation to social and economic perspectives. The important role of education for a more sustainable future has been emphasized in transnational policy documents over the years (UNESCO 2006;2015). In education for sustainable development (ESD), an interdisciplinary approach to SD can facilitate students’ understanding of its complexity (Gough 2002; Warburton 2003). This contribution aims to provide insight into young adults’ views of the relationships between dimensions of SD. 638 students in their final year of upper secondary schools across Sweden (age 18-19) responded to a Likert-scale questionnaire. The results indicate that economic perspectives are associated with great complexity and less recognized compared to social and environmental perspectives in SD (Author et al. 2014; 2015). The role of the economy has been discussed longtime, in relation to its impact on the environment and the development of the society (e.g. Daly 1990; Ekins 2000; Neumayer 2003; Hopwood et al. 2005; Costanza et al. 2014). It is argued that sustainability education should embrace critical and reflective perspectives, however few educational studies have focused on the role of the economy in SD. A study from Australia concludes that economic perspectives in sustainability education are largely missing and thus, the status quo is not being challenged (Dyment et al. 2015). To look deeper into students’ understanding of economic perspectives in SD, we performed an explorative cluster analysis (Author et al. submitted), based on student responses to items concerning the relationships between economic growth, economic development and SD. Four viewpoints emerged from the analysis, which we labeled into The un-differentiating positive, The nuanced ambivalent, The bilaterally convinced and The critical ones.