Abhijit Banerjee Wins 2019 Nobel Prize In Economics, Facts About Him

Add as a preferred source on Google

It is a proud moment for Indians as Abhijit Banerjee wins 2019 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. He is among one of the three economists who has "introduced a new approach to obtaining reliable answers about the best ways to fight global poverty."

Abhijeet is an Indian American Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor and is sharing the Nobel prize with his French-American wife Esther Duflo and another economist Michael Kremer.

Born in Mumbai in 1961, he studied at the University of Calcutta and Jawaharlal Nehru University. The 58-year-old received his PHD from Harvard University.

He also founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) in 2003, along with Duflo, who is also a MIT professor, and Sendhil Mullainathan.

"We must arm ourselves with patience and wisdom and listen to the poor what they want. This is the best way to avoid the trap of ignorance, ideology and inertia on our side," he wrote in his book, 'Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty'.

This book has been translated in 17 languages and has won the Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award in 2011. He has written four books and numerous articles. He has edited 3 more books as well and directed two documentary films.

Just a couple of hours back from now, the official Twitter feed of the Nobel Prize shared this news- The 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel has been awarded to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty."#NobelPrize

Chief Minister of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee was elated to share this wonderful news on Twitter and congratulated Abhijeet. She wrote- "Hearty congratulations to Abhijit Banerjee, alumnus of South Point School & Presidency College Kolkata, for winning the Nobel Prize in Economics. Another Bengali has done the nation proud. We are overjoyed."

There were series of Tweets shared by the official Twitter feed of the Nobel Prize and it mentioned that "the research conducted by the 2019 Economic Sciences Laureates has 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."

In another tweet, it was mentioned that each year, about five million children still die before their fifth birthday, often from diseases that could be prevented or cured with relatively cheap and simple treatments. Also, more than 700 million people still subsist on extremely low incomes.

The second last tweet mentioned, "The 2019 Economic Sciences Laureates' research findings have dramatically improved our ability to fight poverty in practice. As a result of one of their studies, more than 5 million Indian children have benefitted from programmes of remedial tutoring in schools."

"In the 2019 Laureates' early field experiments, more textbooks and free school meals had small effects, while targeted help for weak students significantly improved educational outcomes. This showed that help targeting the weakest pupils was an effective measure," mentioned the last tweet.