News: The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics, to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.
Facts:
Work: The work of the three economists had shown how the problem of poverty could be tackled by breaking it down into smaller and more precise questions in areas such as education and healthcare, making problems easier to tackle.
Impact of the Work on Policy Making
- Research surrounding remedial tutoring provided arguments for large scale support programmes that have now reached by 5 million children in India
- Their studies showed that deworming provides clear health benefits to school children but also parents are very price sensitive. This led to the WHO recommend that medicine should be distributed free to over 800 million school children living in areas where over 20% of them have a specific type of parasitic worm infection.
- Their studies paved the way for heavy subsidies for preventive healthcare that have been introduced in many countries.
Additional Information:
Nobel Prizes:
- The Nobel Prize is a set of annual international awards bestowed in several categories by Swedish and Norwegian institutions in recognition of academic, cultural, or scientific advances.
- The will of the Swedish chemist, engineer and industrialist Alfred Nobel established the Nobel prizes in physics, chemistry, medicine, peace and literature in 1895.
- Nobel Prize in Economics was created by Sweden’s Central Bank in 1968. It is officially known as Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.
- Amartya Sen received the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 1998 for his contributions to welfare economics.
