Two researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, and a third from Harvard University won the 2019 Nobel Prize in economics on Monday for groundbreaking research into what works and what doesn’t in the fight to reduce global poverty.
The US$918,000 cash award went to MIT’s Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo and Harvard’s Michael Kremer. The 46-year-old Duflo is the youngest ever to win the prize and only the second woman, after Elinor Ostrom in 2009. The three winners have worked together.
They revolutionised developmental economics by pioneering field experiments – something like pharmaceutical companies’ drug tests – that generate practical insights into how poor people respond to educational, health care and other programmes meant to lift them out of poverty.
“Without spending some time understanding the intricacies of the lives of the poor and why they make the choices they make (…) it is impossible to design the right approach,” Duflo told a news conference held by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, who awarded the prize.
Their work in rural Kenya and in India, for instance, found that providing more textbooks, school meals and teachers didn’t do much to help students learn more.
Making the schoolwork more relevant to students, working closely with the neediest students and holding teachers accountable – by putting them on short-term contracts, for example – were more effective in countries where teachers often don’t bother showing up for work. The winners’ recommended program of remedial tutoring is now benefiting 5 million Indian children, the academy said.
Kremer and others found that providing free health care makes a big difference: Only 18 per cent of parents gave their children de-worming pills for parasitic infections when they had to pay for them – even though the heavily subsidized price was less than US$1. But 75 per cent gave their kids the pills when they were free. The World Health Organization now recommends that the medicine be distributed for free in areas with high rates of parasitic worm infections.
Bannerjee, Duflo and others found that mobile vaccination clinics in India dramatically increased the immunization rates compared to traditional health centres that often went unstaffed. The immunization rate rose further if parents received a bag of lentils as a bonus for vaccinating their children.
Bannerjee and Duflo, who are married, also have found that microcredit programs, which provide small loans to encourage poor people to start businesses, did little to help the poor in the Indian city Hyderabad; studies in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Ethiopia, Morocco, Mexico and Mongolia, produced similar results.
Despite enormous progress, global poverty remains a huge challenge, the academy noted. More than 700 million people live in extreme poverty. Five million children die before age 5, often from diseases that can be prevented or cured easily and inexpensively. Half the world’s children leave school without basic literacy and mathematical skills.
Leave A Comment