Nobel Prize is for entire movement, says Prof Abhijit Banerjee

After winning the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, Indian-origin economist Prof Abhijit Banerjee on Monday said the Prize is for the entire movement, which will "bring the message of policy-based on evidence and hard thinking to many other places as well."

"It is wonderful to get this Prize. It is a Prize not for us but for the entire movement. This is a movement we happen to be at the beginning of mostly luck. And that is grown to be a worldwide movement. There are about 400 professors who are in one form or the other associated with Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) work," he said while speaking at the MIT after the announcement of Nobel Prize.

"It is still going to be wonderful for the movement that this Prize was given. It is going to make it a little easier to penetrate many doors that is half-open to us or not quite open to us. It will hopefully bring the message of policy-based on evidence and hard thinking to many other places as well," he added.

Prof Banerjee said that professors associated with J-PAL do randomized controlled trials on issues that are as diverse as the US schools in Appalachia to governance problems in Indonesia, getting children immunized in India and also getting children under bednets in Africa.

Along with Prof Abhijit, his wife Esther Duflo and American economist Michael Kremer were awarded the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty."

"The research conducted by the 2019 Economic Sciences laureates has considerably improved our 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 a tweet from the official handle of the Nobel Prize committee.

Born in 1961 in Mumbai, Banerjee graduated from the University of Calcutta and completed his further studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University and Harvard University, where he received his PhD in 1988.

Currently, he is the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), as per the university's website.

In 2003 he founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), along with Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan, and he remains one of the lab's directors, Banerjee's bio on MIT website read.

( With inputs from ANI )