India-born wins Nobel Prize in Economics

Indian-American Abhijit Banerjee, his wife Esther Duflo and American economist Michael Kremer jointly won the 2019 Nobel Economics Prize on Monday "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty." The research conducted by the 2019 Economic Sciences 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, 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. It divides this issue into smaller, more manageable lines of enquiry like, for example, formulating the most effective interventions for improving child health, said a statement from the Nobel Committee. Banerjee, 58, was educated at the University of Calcutta, Jawaharlal Nehru University and Harvard University, where he received his PhD in 1988. He’s also said to have helped the Congress party formulate NYAY — a scheme under which Congress would have distributed cash to 20 percent of India's poorest families. This would have come under a minimum guarantee programme, if the party had won the 2019 General Elections. The prize, officially known as the ‘Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences In Memory Of Alfred Nobel’, wasn’t created by the prize founder, but it is considered to be part of the Nobel stable of awards. The prize was created by Riksbanken, the Swedish central bank, in 1968, and the first winner was selected a year later. So far, 81 Nobel laureates in economic sciences have been awarded.