The Nobel Prize in Economics has been awarded to three researchers for their work tackling global poverty.
The award winners include Esther Duflo,... who becomes the youngest person ever to be awarded the prize in economics,... and just the second woman.
Our Kim Mok-yeon reports.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on Monday jointly bestowed three researchers with this year's Nobel Prize in Economics for their efforts to help the world's poverty-stricken people.
"The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has today decided to award the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for 2019 jointly to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty."
According to the Nobel Economic Committee,... the winners were able to find ways to alleviate global poverty,... by breaking down large questions about poverty to focus on "smaller, more manageable questions",... such as improving child health,... and using field experiments to solve them.
"This year's Prize in economic sciences rewards an approach that identifies effective ways of reducing global poverty. The new experimental approach has pushed the research frontier forward in crucial ways. First, it helps us identify the causes of poverty. Second, it helps us draw conclusions about causal effects of policies to fight global poverty. And finally it facilitates the analysis of cost effectiveness across different options of policies to reduce global poverty."
While Banerjee and Duflo become the sixth married partners to collect Nobel Prizes,... at the age of 46,... Duflo becomes the youngest person ever to be awarded the prize in economics,... and only the second woman.
Speaking to reporters, the couple mentioned that South Korea's economic development could be a good case study for developing countries, pointing out the positive results brought about by major investment in technology and education.
The awardees' combined research found even small differences in prices can lead to dramatically different health outcomes,... particularly in preventive care.
Thanks to their research,... the World Health Organization recommended that medicine be distributed at no cost to more than 800 million schoolchildren in areas where more than a fifth of them suffer from parasitic worm infections.
The three winners will split a cash prize of over 900-thousand U.S. dollars, and will also be awarded a gold medal and a diploma on December 10th.
Kim Mok-yeon, Arirang News.
