The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, 2019

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/sjoe.12421
• Date: 01 July 2020
• Published date: 01 July 2020

Scand. J. of Economics 122(3), 852–852, 2020

DOI: 10.1111/sjoe.12421

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic

Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, 2019

Press release fromthe Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

The Royal SwedishAcademy of Sciences has decided to award the Sveriges

Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for 2019 to

Abhijit Banerjee, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,Cambridge, MA, USA

Esther Duflo, Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology, Cambridge, MA, USA

Michael Kremer, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

“for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty”.

Their Research Is Helping Us Fight Poverty

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.

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.

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 howthis 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.

C

The editors of The Scandinavian Journal of Economics 2020.