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The 2024 Nobel Prize for economics has been awarded to academics Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson for their work on wealth disparities between nations.
Acemoglu and Johnson are professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, while Robinson is a professor at the University of Chicago.
They were commended for their work on the impact of institutions and the rule of law on countries’ prosperity.
“This year’s laureates have pioneered new approaches, both empirical and theoretical, that have significantly advanced our understanding of global inequality,” said Nobel committee member Jakob Svensson.
“Reducing the huge differences in income between countries is one of our times’ greatest challenges,” he added.
Svensson said the trio’s work had “helped us understand differences in prosperity between nations” by showing that societies with a poor rule of law and institutions that exploit their populations can struggle to generate growth.
Although the laureates did not propose “simple recipes or concrete policy proposals”, their work had a “huge societal impact”, he said.
The Nobel committee added that their insights showed that democracies were “on average, in the long run . . . better for promoting growth”.
The committee emphasised that while all three worked at US universities, none were Americans. Acemoglu was born in Turkey and his two colleagues in Britain.
Speaking from Athens, Greece, after the prize was announced, Acemoglu said the trio’s work could best be summarised as the study of the “natural experiment” created by colonialism.
This had “divided the world into very different institutional trajectories”, he said, with countries set on distinct paths depending on the resources European settlers had brought with them and the strategies they adopted.
“Broadly speaking, the work we have done favours democracy,” Acemoglu said.
He added that while China’s recent success in high-tech sectors was “a bit of a challenge” to their conclusions, “our argument has been that this sort of authoritarian growth is often more unstable”.
Acemoglu was born in Istanbul and studied in the UK, receiving his masters and doctorate from the London School of Economics after undergraduate studies in York.
The Turkish-American economist began his academic career at LSE before moving to MIT. He won the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded to the most promising American economist under the age of 40 by the American Economic Association, in 2005.
Acemoglu worked with Robinson on the best-selling book Why Nations Fail.
Johnson was born in Sheffield but has spent his working life in the US. Before joining MIT, he worked at the Washington-based Peterson Institute think-tank and served as the IMF’s chief economist from 2007 to 2008.
He received his doctorate from MIT, after completing a masters at the University of Manchester and an undergraduate degree from Oxford university.
Robinson, who holds British and American citizenship, received degrees from the LSE and Warwick before completing a doctorate at Yale.
He has been at the University of Chicago since 2015 and previously worked at Harvard University.
Additional reporting by Claire Jones
