In recent years, methods from network science are gaining rapidly interest in economics and finance. A reason for this is that in a globalized world the interconnectedness among economic and financial entities are crucial to understand and networks provide a natural framework for representing and studying such systems. In this paper, we are surveying the use of networks and network-based methods for studying economy related questions. We start with a brief overview of graph theory and basic definitions. Then we discuss descriptive network measures and network 1 arXiv:1710.04455v1 [q-fin.CP] 12 Oct 2017 complexity measures for quantifying structural properties of economic networks. Finally, we discuss different network and tree structures as relevant for applications.