A Nobel Prize in economics for work on poverty reduction

The French Esther Duflo, her American Indian husband Abhijit Banerjee and the American Michael Kremer have introduced a new (experimental) approach to obtain reliable answers on the best way to reduce poverty in the worldannounced the secretary general of the Royal Academy of Sciences, GOran Hansson, in Stockholm.

In the mid-1990s, Michael Kremer, 54, a professor at Harvard University, demonstrated how powerful this approach can be by using field experiments to test various interventions that can improve academic outcomes in western Kenyaexplains the Academy.

Esther Duflo made a name for herself by conducting research with her 58-year-old PhD supervisor, Abhijit Banerjee, on poor communities in India and Africa, to measure the real impact of micropolitics. Their experimental research methods now dominate the development economy.

Thanks to them, More than five million children in India have benefited from effective school support programs and many countries have made important subsidies for preventive medicine.

Despite recent and significant improvements, however, the Academy recalls, one of humanity's most pressing challenges is the reduction of poverty in the world, in all its forms. Some 700 million people still live in extreme poverty, according to the World Bank.

Esther Duflo, professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is one of the most celebrated economists in the world, especially in the United States. Recipient of the 2010 John Bates Clark Medal, she is only the second woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Economics after American Elinor Ostrom in 2009.

I am very honored. To be honest, I did not think it was possible to win the Nobel as youngresponded the economist who becomes at 46 the youngest of the winners of the economics prize.

The only honored woman of the Nobel 2019 edition, her work earned her in 2013 to be chosen by the White House to advise President Barack Obama on development issues by sitting on the new Committee for Global Development.

Our vision of poverty is dominated by caricatures and clichesshe explained in an interview in September 2017.

Asked in English Monday about what she will do with the sum of nine million Swedish kronor (about 1.2 million Canadian dollars) to share among the winners, Ms. Duflo replied: At the age of 8 or 9, I read a biography of Marie Curie, and when she got her first Nobel Prize she bought a gram of radium. (…) I imagine that we will discuss all three to know what will be our gram of radium.

The latest winner of the Nobel Prize, the "Swedish Bank of Economics Prize in Memory of Alfred Nobel" was created in 1968 to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the Bank of Sweden.

It was awarded in 2018 to Americans William Nordhaus and Paul Romer, who described the virtues and nuisances of economic activity on the climate.

The other Nobel 2019

After a 2018 edition dynasty exceptional because of the postponement of the prize for literature, the 2019 Nobel season will have raised little passions or provoked controversy beyond the consecration of the Austrian writer Peter Handke.

The author of Goalkeeper's Anguish at the time of the penalty is hated in part of the Balkans for his pro-Serb positions and his presence in 2006 at the funeral of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, accused of crimes against humanity and genocide.

Its prize has revived an old debate, recurrent in France with the Celine case, on the separation between the work of a writer and his political commitment. Summoned to answer it, the president of the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy which awards the prize decided it of a formula: Handke is not a political writer.

As critics had expected, the 2018 Literature Award, postponed a year after a MeToo sex-trafficking scandal, went to a woman, Olga Tokarczuk of Poland.

The Swedish Academy, weighed down by this affair in which a Frenchman married to an academician was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for rape, had only one goal in mind this year: to make the least possible waves and to return to the "style" while the predecessors of Olga Tokarczuk and Peter Handke had crumpled the defenders of the beautiful letters, Bob Dylan (2016), too "pop" and not enough literary in their eyes, Kazuo Ishiguro (2017), too "big" public. "

Announced in Oslo, the price of peace has opted for a so-called "classic" choice with Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, the architect of a spectacular reconciliation with the former Eritrean enemy brother.