STOCKHOLM: A trio of Americans on Monday won the Nobel Economics Prize for their work in the fight against poverty, including Esther Duflo, the youngest-ever economics laureate and only the second woman to win the prize.
Duflo – a 46-year-old French-American professor who has served as an advisor to ex-US president Barack Obama – shared the Nobel with her husband, Indian-born Abhijit Banerjee and fellow American Michael Kremer “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.
“This year’s laureates have introduced a new approach to obtaining reliable answers about the best ways to fight global poverty,” the jury said.
The science academy said that “more than 700 million people still subsist on extremely low incomes“, and that around five million children under the age of 5 still die every year from preventable or curable diseases.
The trio found efficient ways of combating poverty by breaking down difficult issues into smaller, more manageable questions, which can then be answered through field experiments, the jury said.
Duflo is only the second woman to win the Nobel Economics Prize in its 50-year existence, following American Elinor Ostrom in 2009.
Banerjee and Duflo are professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), while Kremer is a professor at Harvard University, all based in Boston.
Duflo has made her name conducting research, together with her husband, who was her PhD supervisor, on poor communities in India and Africa, seeking to weigh the impact of policies such as incentivising teachers to show up for work or measures to empower women.
Her tests, which have been likened to clinical trials for drugs, seek to identify and demonstrate which investments are worth making and have the biggest impact on the lives of the most deprived.
“Economics have a lot to say why the times are hard and what to do about it,” Duflo said at a press conference at MIT in Boston.
“The two groups that did relatively well in the world economy are the ultra-rich and the ultra-poor.”
But she noted that even when basic material comforts are covered for people in developed economies “their full life might have the same level of misery and unhappiness that some of the extremely poor people we study.”
Banerjee said governments have not taken seriously the harm inflicted from globalisation.
“The policy response to the pain caused by globalisation was inadequate, (and) often been the wrong direction,” he said.
Duflo told the Nobel committee in a phone interview that she didn’t think it was possible to win the prize “before being significantly older than any of the three of us.”
Banerjee is 58 and Kremer is 54.
Banerjee said he was “delighted” that research into alleviating poverty had received some attention.
The son of two economists, Banerjee grew up in Kolkata in eastern India, and has been a vocal critic of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Ahead of elections earlier this year – that saw Modi cruise to a second term – Banerjee advised the opposition Congress party on its proposed guaranteed basic income scheme for tens of millions of India’s poorest.
In the 1990s, Kremer used field experiments to test interventions to improve school results in western Kenya.
He has also helped develop programmes to incentivise the distribution of vaccines for diseases in the developing world.
The trio will share the prize sum of nine million Swedish kronor (US$914,000). - AFP