Royal Swedish Academy of Science has announced Nobel Prize for economics to three economists Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer. The award was due to outstanding contribution in the field of “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.”
Three visionaries have been awarded for their experimental based approach to tackle poverty and using randomized control trial to take out the solution for education and child health.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences declared: “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.”
“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,” the Nobel Prize Committee said.
MIT’s Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo have won the @NobelPrize in #economics, “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.” Congratulations! They share the prize with Michael Kremer of Harvard. pic.twitter.com/cYx4ePMrTN
— Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (@MIT) October 14, 2019
Indian American Abhijit Banerjee went back to bed after the call from Stockholm. “It was very early in the morning. I’m not an early morning person. I figured it would be an assault to the system if I don’t continue to sleep,” Mr Banerjee said in a short 4-and-half-minute clip released by the Nobel Committee on YouTube.
Abhijit Banerjee said “It’s been an entire family enterprise in a sense, between research and working at MIT. It becomes much more pleasant when you do it with your partner.”
“There is an enormous fight going on in India about which data is right and the government has a particular view of (that) all data that is inconvenient to it is wrong. But nonetheless, I think that this is something that I think even the government is increasingly recognising that there is a problem. So the economy slowing very very fast. How fast we don’t know, there is this dispute about data but I think fast,” he said.