Big day for US duo
Economists William Nordhaus and Paul Romer shared the 2018 Nobel Economics Prize for integrating innovation and climate with economic growth.
STOCKHOLM: United States economists William Nordhaus and Paul Romer shared the 2018 Nobel Economics Prize for integrating innovation and climate with economic growth, the jury said.
Nordhaus, a professor at Yale University, and Romer, a former World Bank chief economist now at New York University’s Stern School of Business, have addressed “some of our time’s most basic and pressing questions about how we create longterm sustained and sustainable growth,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement yesterday.
It said the pair have “significantly broadened the scope of economic analysis by constructing models that explain how the market economy interacts with nature and knowledge.”
Nordhaus, 77, was specifically honoured for “integrating climate change into longrun macroeconomic analysis.”
The 62yearold Romer meanwhile won for “integrating technological innovations into longrun macroeconomic analysis.”
Both have been tipped as frontrunners for the Nobel in recent years.
The pair will share the nine million Swedish kronor (US$1.01mil RM4.57mil) prize.
Last year, the honour went to US economist Richard Thaler, a cofounder of the socalled “nudge” theory, which demonstrates how people can be persuaded to make decisions that leave them healthier and happier.
Unlike the other Nobel prizes which were created in Swedish inventor and philanthropist Alfred Nobel’s last will and testament and first awarded in 1901, the economics prize was created by the Swedish central bank, the Riksbank,in 1968 to mark its tricentenary.
It was first awarded in 1969. “From a historical perspective, there are about as many conservative as liberal economists in recent years and the trend has been for diversification: the range of fields of research that have been honoured has been more vast, the choice of laureates has been more eclectic,” economist Gabriel Soderberg of Sweden’s Uppsala University said.
“The heart of the Nobel prizes are the awards for science, peace and literature.
“The economics prize is not formally a Nobel prize,” Soderberg added.
The Nobel, which also consists of a diploma and a gold medal, will be presented at a formal ceremony in Stockholm on Dec 10.
The Nobel economics prize wraps up the 2018 awards season, notable this year for the lack of a literature prize, postponed by a year for the first time in 70 years over a rape scandal that came to light as part of the #MeToo movement.
Last week, after the prizes for medicine, physics and chemistry were announced, the most highlyanticipated Nobel, that for peace, went to Yazidi women’s campaigner Nadia Murad and Congolese doctor Denis Mukwege for their work in fighting sexual violence in conflicts around the world.