On October 14, 2024, the Nobel Committee held a press conference at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, to announce the list of winners of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. Rue, Simon Johnson and James Robinson for their work on institutional formation and its impact on welfare.
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U.S. economists Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson were awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Science on Monday for their work on wealth inequality among countries.
The Nobel committee said the scholars had helped reveal why societies “with poor rule of law and institutions that exploit populations fail to lead to growth or change for the better” and had demonstrated “the importance of social institutions to national prosperity”.
Acemoglu and Johnson are professors at MIT, and Robinson is director of the Pearson Institute for Global Conflict Research and Resolution at the University of Chicago, specializing in the economies of sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.
Simon Johnson, economist, professor at MIT.
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Acemoglu and Robinson wrote the best-selling 2012 book Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, which explores the roots of inequality and the reasons why some countries succeed in gaining wealth and influence.
Jakob Svensson, director of the Institute of International Economics and professor of economics at Stockholm University, said in a news release that the laureates “have pioneered new empirical and theoretical approaches that have significantly enhanced our understanding of global inequality.” .
He added that the question of why the gap between poor and rich countries is so persistent is not new but remains “one of the most pressing questions in social science”.
The award is officially called the Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, and the winner will receive 11 million Swedish krona ($1.058 million) from the Riksbank.
The prize will be divided equally among the winners – as will be the case in 2022, when the prize was divided between U.S. economists Ben Bernanke, Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig Dybvig) equally divided.
Economist and historian Claudia Goldin has been awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for improving our understanding of women’s earnings and labor market outcomes.
James A. Robinson, British economist and professor at the University of Chicago, speaks at the 2018 Camachol Conference in Cartagena, Colombia, on June 8, 2018.
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Last week, Japan’s atomic bomb survivor group Nippon Hidan Kyo won the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of its efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons.
The other Nobel Prizes, first awarded in 1901, are physics, Chemical, physiology or medicineand literature.
The Economic Science Prize was established in 1968 to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the Riksbank and was first awarded a year later. The laureates are selected by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in recognition of work of “outstanding importance”.
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