It is a proud moment for India as the 2019 Nobel Economics Prize has been awarded to Indian American economist Abhijit Banerjee by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The award will be shared with Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer for the trio’s innovative approach to eradicate poverty globally.
The award is officially known as the ‘Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel’.
The laureates will also receive a gold medal, a diploma and 9 million-kronor ($918,000) cash award, which will be equally divided amongst the three.
The committee said that the research conducted by three laureates “considerably improved our ability to fight global poverty. In just two decades, their new experiment-based approach has transformed development economics, which is now a flourishing field of research.”
Born in Mumbai in 1961, Abhijit Banerjee was an alumni of Presidency College and Jawaharlal Nehru University. He received his PhD in 1988. Banerjee is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
