Indian-American economist Abhijit Banerjee won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics, along with his French-American wife Esther Duflo of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Michael Kremer of Harvard University “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.” The three were recognized for their ability to divide the issue of tackling global poverty into smaller subjects. They were awarded medals and the prize money of nine million Swedish krona (approximately Rs 6.7 crore) in Sweden on Dec. 11, 2019. According to the Nobel citation, their extensive research will help in improving the ability to combat global poverty.
Banerjee and his co-workers try to measure the effectiveness of actions (such as government programmes) in improving people’s lives. For this, they use randomized controlled trials, similar to clinical trials in medical research. For example, although polio vaccination is freely available in India, many mothers were not bringing their children for the vaccination drives. Banerjee and Prof. Esther Duflo, also from MIT, tried an experiment in Rajasthan, where they gifted a bag of pulses to mothers who vaccinated their children. Soon, the immunization rate went up in the region. In another experiment, they found that learning outcomes improved in schools that were provided with teaching assistants to help students with special needs.
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