On Monday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer had won the 2019 Nobel Prize for economics "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty”.
The research conducted by them has considerably improved the 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 Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Here are some interesting facts about the Indian-origin Abhijit Banerjee.
1.
Banerjee was born in Mumbai on February 21, 1961
2.
Banerjee was educated at the University of Calcutta, Jawaharlal Nehru University and Harvard University, where he received his PhD in 1988
3.
He is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
4.
He is the author of a large number of articles and four books, including Poor Economics, which won the Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year
5.
He has also served on the UN Secretary-General’s High-level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda
6.
Banerjee shares the Nobel with two others -- Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer. Esther is Banerjee's wife
7.
In 2003, he founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), along with his French-American wife Duflo, who is also a MIT professor, and Sendhil Mullainathan. He remains one of the lab's directors, according to the MIT website
8.
Banerjee was consulted by the Congress for its NYAY programme, which had suggested a minimum income guarantee of Rs 2,500 per month