The Nobel Prize in economics awarded to researchers studying global inequality – National
Three US-based academics won the 2024 Nobel Economics Prize on Monday for research that examined the impact of colonialism on why global inequality persists today, especially in countries plagued by corruption and dictatorship.
Simon Johnson and James Robinson, both British-Americans, and Turkish-American Daron Acemoglu were praised for their work on “how institutions are built and affect prosperity,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.
“Reducing the huge disparity in the income of countries is one of the biggest challenges of our time,” said Jakob Svensson, Chairman of the Economic Science Prize Committee.
“They have identified the historical roots of the institutional weaknesses that characterize many low-income countries today,” he told a press conference.
The award came a day after a World Bank report revealed that the world’s 26 poorest countries – home to 40 percent of the poorest people – are more indebted than at any time since 2006, highlighting a major shift in the fight against poverty. .
The prestigious prize, officially known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, is the last prize to be awarded this year and is worth 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million).
Acemoglu told the Nobel press conference that data collected by pro-democracy groups shows that public institutions and the rule of law in many parts of the world are currently being weakened.
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“I think this is a time when democracies are going through a difficult time,” Acemoglu said. “And in a way it’s very important that they regain a higher ground for better governance, cleaner governance, and to bring the kind of promise of democracy to the masses.”
Acemoglu and Johnson work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, while Robinson is at the University of Chicago.
The award-winners’ research has shown that European colonialism had dramatic but varied effects around the world, depending on whether the facilitator focused on the extraction of resources or the establishment of long-term institutions for the benefit of European immigrants.
This, they found, resulted in a “reversal of fortunes” where once rich former colonies became poor, while other poor countries – where institutions were often established – were finally able to achieve some prosperity through them.
Other findings include how “dangerous” it was to colonize an area: high mortality rates among colonists, low current output per capita, average prosperity.
The economic prize is not one of the first prizes for science, literature and peace created in the will of the inventor of dynamite and businessman Alfred Nobel and awarded for the first time in 1901, but the addition was later established and funded by the central bank of Sweden in 1968.
Past winners include a host of influential thinkers such as Milton Friedman, John Nash – played by actor Russell Crowe in the 2001 film “A Beautiful Mind” – and, most recently, former US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.
Research on inequality has featured prominently in recent awards. Last year, Harvard economic historian Claudia Goldin won an award for her work highlighting the causes of wage and labor market inequality between men and women.
In 2019, economists Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer won the prize for working to fight poverty.
The economic award has been dominated by US academics since its inception, and US researchers also tend to account for a large proportion of the winners in the scientific fields announced last week for the 2024 winners.
That harvest of awards began when American scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun won the medicine prize on Monday and ended with Japan’s Nihon Hidankyo, an organization of survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that has campaigned for the abolition of nuclear weapons, receiving the peace prize on Friday. .
-Reporting by Simon Johnson and Johan Ahlander in Stockholm, Mark John in London; additional reporting by Niklas Pollard in Stockholm and Terje Solsvik in Oslo; Edited by Alex Richardson
