US trio win Nobel Economics Prize for work on poverty

STOCKHOLM: A trio of Americans on Monday won the Nobel Economics Prize for their work in the fight against poverty, including Esther Duflo, the youngest-ever economics laureate and only the second woman to win the prize.

Duflo -- a 46-year-old French-American professor who has served as an advisor to ex-US president Barack Obama -- shared the Nobel with her husband, Indian-born Abhijit Banerjee of the US, and American Michael Kremer "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

"This year´s laureates have introduced a new approach to obtaining reliable answers about the best ways to fight global poverty," the jury said. The science academy said that “more than 700 million people still subsist on extremely low incomes”, and that around five million children under the age of five still die every year from preventable or curable diseases.

The three found efficient ways of combatting poverty by breaking down difficult issues into smaller, more manageable questions, which can then be answered through field experiments, the jury said.

“They have shown that these smaller, more precise, questions are often best answered via carefully designed experiments among the people who are most affected,” it said. Duflo is only the second woman to win the Nobel Economics Prize in its 50-year existence, following Elinor Ostrom in 2009.

Duflo, 46, told the Nobel committee in a phone interview the honour was “incredibly humbling”. “I didn´t think it was possible to win the Nobel Prize in Economics before being significantly older than any of the three of us,” she added.

Banerjee is 58 and Kremer is 54. In the past 20 years, more than three-quarters of economics laureates have been American white males over the age of 55.

Duflo has made her name conducting research, together with her husband who was her PhD supervisor, on poor communities in India and Africa, seeking to weigh the impact of policies such as incentivising teachers to show up for work or measures to empower women.

Her tests, which have been likened to clinical trials for drugs, seek to identify and demonstrate which investments are worth making and have the biggest impact on the lives of the most deprived. “Our vision of poverty is dominated by caricatures and cliches,” she said in a September 2017 interview.

French President Emmanuel Macron hailed the “magnificent” Nobel to Duflo, writing on Twitter that her work “shows that research in this field can have a concrete impact on the well-being of humanity”. She added, jokingly, that her son failed to tell her the award was coming his way when she spoke with him on the telephone on Sunday. “I will tell him off,” she said.