Nobel economics prize goes to trio

STOCKHOLM: A trio of American economists yesterday won the Nobel economics prize for their work in the fight against poverty, including with new approaches in education and healthcare, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

Indian-born Abhijit Banerjee of the US, his French-American wife Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer of the US were honoured “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty,” the jury said.

“This year’s laureates have introduced a new approach to obtaining reliable answers about the best ways to fight global poverty.”

The three found efficient ways of combatting poverty by breaking down difficult issues into smaller, more manageable questions, which can then be answered through field experiments, the jury said.

“They have shown that these smaller, more precise, questions are often best answered via carefully designed experiments among the people who are most affected,” it said.

“As a direct result of one of their studies, more than five million Indian children have benefitted from effective programmes of remedial tutoring in schools. Another example is the heavy subsidies for preventive healthcare that have been introduced in many countries.”

Duflo is only the second woman to win the Nobel economics prize in its 50-year existence, following Elinor Ostrom in 2009.

Duflo, 46, told the Nobel committee by video link the honour was incredibly humbling. “I didn’t think it was possible to win the Nobel prize in economics before being significantly older than any of the three of us.”

Banerjee, born in 1961, and Duflo are both professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US, while Kremer, 54, is a professor at Harvard University.

Unlike the other Nobels awarded since 1901, the economics prize was not created by the prizes’ founder Alfred Nobel, in his 1895 will. It was devised in 1968 to mark the 300th anniversary of Sweden’s central bank, and first awarded in 1969.

Each of the Nobels comes with a prize sum of nine million Swedish kronor ($914,000), to be shared if there is more than one winner in the discipline.

But unluckily for recent winners, the prize’s value has lost around $185,000 in the past two years, due to the depreciation of the Swedish krona.

The trio will receive the prize from King Carl XVI Gustaf at a formal ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of Alfred Nobel.

Last year, the prize went to William Nordhaus and Paul Romer of the US for constructing “green growth” models.