Odishatv Bureau

The 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel has been awarded to Indian-American Abhijit Banerjee along with Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.”

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has announced the prize on Monday, 14 October.

Born in Kolkata, Banerjee is an alumnus of Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, JNU, New Delhi. MIT educated- Banerjee, who also has worked as Rahul Gandhi’s advisor, had said high inflation is good for economy and NYAY scheme will be funded by high taxes, inflation.

2019 Economic Sciences Laureate Esther Duflo, born in 1972, is the second woman and the youngest person to be awarded the Prize in Economic Sciences. MIT professor Duflo is married to Banerjee.

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. Over 700 million people still subsist on extremely low incomes. Every year, five million children still die before their fifth birthday, often from diseases that could be prevented or cured with relatively cheap and simple treatments. 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 questions – for example, the most effective interventions for improving child health. In the mid-1990s, Economic Sciences Laureate Michael Kremer and his colleagues demonstrated how powerful an experiment-based approach can be, using field experiments to test a range of interventions that could improve school results in western Kenya. 2019 Economic Sciences Laureates Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, often with Michael Kremer, soon performed similar studies of other issues and in other countries, including India. Their experimental research methods now entirely dominate development economics. The 2019 Economic Sciences Laureates’ research findings have dramatically improved our ability to fight poverty in practice. As a result of one of their studies, more than 5 million Indian children have benefitted from programmes of remedial tutoring in schools.

 

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