This year’s prestigious ‘Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel’, better known as Nobel Prize in Economics was conferred to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer. This year The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded them “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.” The three awardees will also receive a 9 million-kronor ($918,000) cash award, a gold medal and a diploma. The cash prize will be shared equally among them.
French-American Duflo is the second woman to win the economics prize and the youngest in the prize’s 50-year history. Elinor Ostrom was the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in 2009 “for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons.” Duflo, 47, is a French American economist, who is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab.
Abhijit Banerjee, 58, was born in India and has a PhD from Harvard University. He is a Professor of Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US. Banerjee studied at the University of Calcutta, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and Harvard University, where he received his PhD in 1988. He is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). With Abhijit Banerjee, Duflo wrote Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, which won the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award in 2011 and has been translated into 17 languages.
Michael Kremer, 54, is the Gates Professor of Developing Societies in the Department of Economics at Harvard University. Dr. Kremer received his PhD in Economics from Harvard University. He is a member of the board of Precision Agriculture for Development.
As a result of one of their many studies, more than five million Indian children have been benefitted from programmes of remedial tutorials in schools. Another example is the heavy subsidies for preventive healthcare that have been introduced in many countries. A large number of schools were randomly chosen and divided into different groups. Then they were provided with the different resources. Schools in one group were given free books, while another group, free meals, for instance. The problem of comparing schools with different average characteristics is solved in RCTs (randomized control trials). A large number of schools were picked and the characteristics of the schools were matched. Kremer found that free meals and free books did not have any significant impact on learning outcomes.
The Nobel Prize winners have also criticized the Indian education system for many reasons. It is for its emphasis on clearing ‘difficult’ exams and getting students job-ready, creating a situation of losers and winners. According to Banerjee, Duflo, and Kremer too, this ignores the fact that small improvements in learning outcomes can have positive impacts on their ability to negotiate the world.
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