NOBEL BOOST FOR INCLUSIVE DEVELOPMENT

The 2019 Nobel Prize in economics was awarded on Monday to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer for pioneering new ways to alleviate global poverty. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the three economists pioneered new ways to fight global poverty by focusing on smaller, more manageable issues

STUDYING OUTCOMES

The laureates’ research showed that smaller, more precise, questions are often best answered through carefully designed experiments among the people who are most affected.

Banerjee and Duflo, who married in 2015 and teach at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), borrowed methodology of the pharmaceutical industry — subjecting different types of aid to randomised controlled trials.

A cornerstone of their finding from years of research in several countries was that when socio-cultural factors are taken into account while tweaking aid, outcomes improve.

Kremer, in the 1990s, used field experiments to test interventions to improve school results in western Kenya. He has also helped develop programmes to incentivise distribution of vaccines

THE UDAIPUR EXAMPLE

The findings are captured in an experiment in villages in Rajasthan where Banerjee, Duflo and their MIT team studied two infant immunisation campaigns. A slightly tweaked campaign, which offered 1kg of daal for every mother who brought their children for shot, had a significantly better turnout than a routine camp.