STOCKHOLM: Indian-American innovative MIT economist Abhijit Banerjee, his wife Esther Duflo and Harvard professor Michael Kremer jointly won the 2019 Nobel Economics Prize on Monday “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty”.
Banerjee and French-American Duflo both work at the US-based Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) while Kremer is at Harvard University.
It was “wonderful” to receive the award, 58-year-old Banerjee said. “You don’t get this lucky many times in your life,” he added.
Duflo, the 46-year-old former advisor to ex-US president Barack Obama, is the second woman and the youngest ever to win the economics prize.
“We are incredibly happy and humbled,” Duflo was quoted as saying by the MIT News. “We feel very fortunate to see this kind of work being recognized.” Kremer, 54, a development economist, is currently the Gates Professor of Developing Societies at Harvard University.
The prize includes 9 million-kronor (USD 918,000) cash, a gold medal and a diploma. The winners will equally share the prize money.
Announcing the award, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said 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.”
They have introduced a new approach to obtaining reliable answers about the best ways to fight global poverty, it said.
Their “research findings – and those of the researchers following in their footsteps – have dramatically improved our ability to fight poverty in practice,” 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, it added.
“Showing that it is possible for a woman to succeed and be recognised for success I hope is going to inspire many, many other women to continue working and many other men to give them the respect they deserve,” Duflo told a press conference over phone soon after the announcement.
Banerjee was educated at the University of Calcutta, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D in 1988. He is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the MIT.
Banerjee founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), along with Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan, and he remains one of its directors. He also served on the UN Secretary-General’s High-level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda.
Banerjee supervised Duflo’s PhD with Joshua Angrist in 1990. The duo got married in 2015 and their co-authored book ‘Good Economics in Hard Times’ will hit the stands this week.
With Banerjee, Duflo wrote Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, which won the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award in 2011 and has been translated into more than 17 languages.
JNU vice-chancellor M Jagadesh Kumar also expressed pride at Banerjee’s achievement. “JNU is proud of his achievement. Our alumni are torch bearers of JNU. We are proud of them,” he tweeted. (PTI)
