NOBEL PRIZE : 'ECONOMICS -TRIO- ECSTATIC '

NOBEL PRIZE FOR ECONOMICS 2019 : Professor Abhjit Banerjee, MIT, Professor Esther Duflo, MIT, Professor Michael Kremer, Harvard.

STOCKHOLM : A trio of American economists on Monday won the Nobel Economics Prize for their work in the fight against poverty, including novel initiatives in education and healthcare, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

Indian born Abihijit Baneerjee of the US, his French-American wife Esther Duflo - a former adviser to ex-Us president Barack Obama - and Michael Kremer of the US were honored ''for their experimental approach for alleviating global poverty,'' the jury said.

''This years 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 combating 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 people who are most affected,'' it said.

''As a direct result of one of their studies, more than five million Indian children have benefited from effective programmes of remedial tutoring in schools. Another example is the heavy subsidies for preventive healthcare that have been introduced in many countries,'' the jury said

Duflo is only the second woman to win the Nobel Economics Prize in its 50 year existence, following Elinor Ostrom in 2009.

Professor Duflo, 46, who is also the youngest person to ever receive the Economics Prize, told the Nobel committee in a phone interview that honour was 'incredibly humbling''.

''I didn't think it was possible to win the Nobel prize in Economics before being significantly older older than any of the three of us,'' she added.

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 weight the impact of policies such as incentivising teachers to show up for work or measures to empower women. [AFP]