Born in Mumbai, educated at University of Calcutta, JNU and Harvard, Abhijit Banerjee's works "have dramatically improved our ability to fight poverty in practice."
Indian-American economist Abhijit Banerjee is one among the three economists awarded this year's Nobel Prize in Economics for their "experimental approach to alleviating global poverty."
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said it has decided to award the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences to Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer.
"The research conducted by this year’s 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," it said in a press release.
The academy further said, "This year’s Laureates have introduced a new approach to obtaining reliable answers about the best ways to fight global poverty. In brief, it involves dividing this issue into smaller, more manageable, questions – for example, the most effective interventions for improving educational outcomes or child health. They have shown that these smaller, more precise, questions are often best answered via carefully designed experiments among the people who are most affected."
"The Laureates’ research findings – and those of the researchers following in their footsteps – have dramatically improved our ability to fight poverty in practice. As a direct result of one of their studies, more than five million Indian children have benefitted from effective programmes of remedial tutoring in schools," it said.
Another example is the heavy subsidies for preventive healthcare that have been introduced in many countries, it further said.
"These are just two examples of how this new research has already helped to alleviate global poverty. It also has great potential to further improve the lives of the worst-off people around the world," the academy said.
Born in 1961 in Mumbai, Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee was educated at the University of Calcutta, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and Harvard University, where he received his PhD in 1988. He is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In 2003, he founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), along with Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan and remains one of the directors of the lab.
His areas of research are development economics and economic theory. Banerjee is a member of J-PAL's Executive Committee and previously served as co-chair of J-PAL’s Education Sector.
In 2009, he received the Infosys Prize 2009 in Social Sciences and Economics.
According to his profile at the J-PAL website, he was named one of Foreign Policy magazine's top 100 global thinkers in 2011.
He is the author of a large number of articles and three books, including Poor Economics which won the Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year. He is the editor of a fourth book, and he finished his first documentary film, "The Name of the Disease," in 2006.
Most recently, Banerjee served on the UN Secretary-General’s High-level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda.
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 "Abhijit Banerjee is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at MIT")
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