Nobel prize in economics awarded to 3 for work in reducing poverty

U.S.-based economists Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer won the 2019 Nobel Economics Prize on Monday for their work in fighting poverty that has helped millions of children around the world.

"This year's Laureates have introduced a new approach to obtaining reliable answers about the best ways to fight global poverty," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement.

It said the results of their studies and field experiments had ranged from helping millions of Indian schoolchildren with remedial tutoring to encouraging governments around the world to increase funding for preventative medicine.

French-American Duflo becomes only the second female economics winner in the prize’s 50-year history, as well as the youngest at 46. She shared the award equally with Indian-born American Banerjee and Kremer, also of the United States.

“It starts from the idea that the poor are often reduced to caricatures and even the people that try to help them do not actually understand what are the deep roots of (their) problems,” Duflo, speaking by telephone, told a news conference in Stockholm.

“Our goal is to make sure that the fight against poverty is based on scientific evidence,” she added of an approach that has included evaluating the impact of often obvious-sounding problems such as a lack of textbooks or teacher absence.

The prize, officially known as the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, was established in 1968 by Sweden's central bank, Sveriges Riksbank. Monday's award is the 51st Nobel in Economics.

The prize this year is worth 9 million Swedish crown ($915,300).