This year’s Nobel Prize in Economics goes to three US researchers, Daron Acemoğlu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson. This was announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. They are honored for their work on the “formation of institutions and their effects on the prosperity” of states. The prize, worth almost one million, is considered the most important award in economics.
Acemoğlu, Johnson and Robinson helped to understand differences in prosperity between countries, the academy explained its decision. They would have looked at societies that were previously colonized by Europeans and whose institutions changed in different ways as a result. The three researchers recognized that societies with a weak constitutional state and institutions that exploit the population generate neither growth nor changes for the better.
:“Institutions are the most important reason why nations survive or fail.”
The American economist Daron Acemoglu receives the Nobel Prize in Economics. In an interview with SZ almost a year ago, he explained what the war in Gaza means for the global economy, why AI doesn’t make us all rich – and what he expects from the election in the USA.
Acemoğlu had previously been named by several economists as a favorite to win this year’s prize. Like Johnson, he conducts research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Robinson works at the University of Chicago. Acemoğlu was surprised and excited about the award. “This is just a real shock and great news. Thank you!” said the 57-year-old when he was connected to the award announcement. “You never expect something like this,” he said. “It’s a great surprise and honor.”
The Nobel Prize in Economics particularly often goes to the USA. In 2022, former US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and US economists Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig were honored with the Nobel Prize for their research into banks and financial crises. And in previous years, the award has often gone to winners who come from the USA or at least work at US universities.
There has only been a German winner once before: exactly 30 years ago, the Bonn mathematician and economist Reinhard Selten (1930–2016) received the prize. Together with the American John Nash and the Hungarian-American researcher John Harsanyi, he was honored in 1994 for pioneering contributions to non-cooperative game theory.
No Nobel Prize sponsored by Alfred Nobel
Last week the Nobel Prizes for Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, Literature and Peace were awarded. While these awards go back to the will of the dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel (1833–1896), the Nobel Prize in Economics has been sponsored by the Swedish central bank since the late 1960s. It therefore only counts to a limited extent among the other Nobel Prizes; its official name, translated from Swedish, means something like: “Prize of the Swedish National Bank in Economics in Memory of Alfred Nobel”.
Like the other Nobel Prizes, it will be ceremoniously presented on the anniversary of Nobel’s death on December 10th. It also comes with the same prize money: this year that is eleven million Swedish crowns (just under 970,000 euros).