Indian Origin Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer Awarded Nobel Prize for Economics

Stockholm: India born economist Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer have been awarded the 2019 Nobel Economics Prize on Monday for their approach to alleviate global poverty, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced. 

Fifty-eight-year-old Banerjee was born in Kolkata in 1961. He studied in Calcutta University’s Presidency College and Jawaharlal Nehru University and then did a PhD from Harvard in 1988.

Duflo, 46, is the second woman to win the economics prize after Elinor Ostrom got it in 2009, and is also the youngest ever to receive the economics award. She is married to Abhijit Banerjee.

Banerjee is the author of four books that includes Poor Economics, for which he won the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award in 2011. The book has been translated into more than 17 languages.

“The research conducted by this year’s Laureates has considerably improved our ability to fight global poverty. In just two decades, their new experiment-based approach has transformed development economics, which is now a flourishing field of research”, said Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in a press release.

Despite recent dramatic improvements, one of humanity’s most urgent issues is the reduction of global poverty, in all its forms. More than 700 million people still subsist on extremely low incomes.

Every year, around five million children under the age of five still die of diseases that could often have been prevented or cured with inexpensive treatments. Half of the world’s children still leave school without basic literacy and numeracy skills.

This year’s Laureates have introduced a new approach to obtaining reliable answers about the best ways to fight global poverty. In brief, it involves dividing this issue into smaller, more manageable, questions – for example, the most effective interventions for improving educational outcomes or child health. They have shown that these smaller, more precise, questions are often best answered via carefully designed experiments among the people who are most affected, the committee said.

In the mid-1990s, Michael Kremer and his colleagues demonstrated how powerful this approach can be, using field experiments to test a range of interventions that could improve school results in western Kenya.

Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, often with Michael Kremer, soon performed similar studies of other issues and in other countries. Their experimental research methods now entirely dominate development economics.

The Laureates’ research findings – and those of the researchers following in their footsteps – have dramatically improved our ability to fight poverty in practice. 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.

These are just two examples of how this new research has already helped to alleviate global poverty. It also has great potential to further improve the lives of the worst-off people around the world, it added.