The Nobel Prize in Economics for 2019 has been awarded to economists Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer "for their experimental approach to alleviating global povertyfrom the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden. The first two are professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, while Kremer is at Harvard University.
“One of the most pressing issues facing humanity is the reduction of global poverty, in all its forms. More than 700 million people still live on extremely low incomes. Every year, some five million children under the age of five still die of diseases that often could have been prevented or treated with inexpensive treatments. Half of the world's children still leave school without possessing basic literacy and numeracy skills”, the official motivation of the Swedish Academy.
Technically it is not one of the prizes established by Alfred Nobel himself and for this reason it is one of the most discussed every year. It has been awarded since 1968, when the Swedish central bank made a huge donation to the Nobel Foundation, the prize is known, in fact, as Bank of Sweden prize for economic sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel.
