Indian-American Abhijit Banerjee, French Esther Duflo, American Michael Kremer win 2019 Economics Nobel

The 2019 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences has been awarded jointly to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer for their experiment-based approach to tackling poverty - in the fast-growing area of development economics. Indian-origin economist Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer have been awarded the prestigious prize for doing research to take the daunting issue of global poverty. Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo are married to each other and both work at MIT, while Michael Kremer is at Harvard. Duflo is also the youngest person to win the Nobel economics prize.

"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," nobelprize.org said in a press release.

Abhijit Banerjee was born on February 21, 1961 in India. The 58-year-old Banerjee attended South Point School and Presidency College, Kolkata, where he completed his B.S. degree in economics in 1981. Banerjee has done his M.A. in economics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi in 1983. He has done Ph.D in 1988 from Harvard University, Cambridge, USA.

Banerjee currently works at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, USA. Banerjee is also the co-founder of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab along with economists Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan. He also served on the UN Secretary-General’s High-level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda.

 

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"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," noted the press release.

"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 five million Indian children have benefitted from programmes of remedial tutoring in schools," the statement said.