Bringing laurels to the country, Indian-American Abhijit Banerjee, along with Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer, has won the 2019 Nobel Economics Prize on Monday “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.”
“The research conducted by this year’s 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,” said the Nobel committee in a statement.
Banerjee, 58, was educated at the University of Calcutta, Jawaharlal Nehru University and Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D in 1988. He is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, according to his profile on the MIT website. Interestingly, he has a Tamilnadu connection, for Banerjee’s Abdul Latif Jameel – Poverty Action Lab, USA (J-PAL) signed a pact with the State government in 2014 for research on various subjects with the main chunk being policy dialogue, research project and capacity building.
J-Pal works with seven government departments — health, education, labour and employment, housing and urban development, social welfare and nutritious meal programme, MSMEs, and commercial taxes. In 2003, Banerjee founded J-PAL, along with Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan, and he remains one of the lab’s directors. He also served on the UN Secretary-General’s High-level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda. Banerjee winning Nobel is certainly a huge honour for the country and also for Tamilnadu. Let us wish him more success.