Nobel Prize for Economics awarded to three economists for poverty research

MIT Economists Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Harvard Economist Michael Kremer won the 2019 Nobel Economics Prize for their work in fighting global poverty. Esther Duffo is the youngest ever winner in the award’s 50-year history, at 46, and only the second woman, after Elinor Ostrom in 2009. Abhijit and Duflo’s research that garnered the award placed a strategic focus on how people in poverty respond to education, health care and other programmes meant to lift them out of poverty. Their work started with the world’s poorest and how markets and institutions work for them. In 2003, they founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-Pal) at MIT to study poverty. Their research highlighted stark inequality gaps around the world by posing the age-old question “why do some countries stay poor while others grow rich?” poverty. Read the full story here.