Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer introduced a paradigm shift in approach to alleviating poverty | The Indian Express

Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer introduced a paradigm shift in approach to alleviating poverty | The Indian Express

Written by HIMANSHU |Updated: October 15, 2019 9:34:34 am

Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer introduced a paradigm shift in approach to alleviating poverty

There is no denying that all the three scholars have contributed a great deal to putting poverty and development economics back on the agenda of economics.

Abhijit Banerjee speaks during a news conference at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., Monday, Oct. 14, 2019. (AP Photo: Michael Dwyer)

The Nobel Prize in Economics for 2019 has been awarded to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer for “their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty”. The approach, popularly known as Randomised Control Trial (RCT), has been the buzzword among development economists for almost two decades. Banerjee, Duflo and Kremer have used this technique (inspired by the use of RCTs in medical science) to test the effect of small interventions on individual behaviour.