Sofia Barruti
(CNN) – A trio of economists received the Nobel Prize in Economics on Monday for their “studies on how institutions are formed and affect prosperity.”
Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson will share the prize, worth 11 million Swedish crowns ($1 million).
The Nobel Committee praised the trio for explaining why “societies with poor rule of law and institutions that exploit the population do not generate growth or change for the better.”
“When Europeans colonized large parts of the world, the institutions of those societies changed,” the committee said, citing the trio’s work. While in many places this was aimed at exploiting the indigenous population, in other places it laid the foundation for inclusive political and economic systems.
“The awardees demonstrated that one explanation for the differences in the prosperity of countries is the social institutions that were introduced during colonization,” the committee added.
Countries that developed “inclusive institutions” have become prosperous over time, while those that developed “extractive institutions” have experienced persistently low economic growth.
In their 2012 book “Why Countries Fail,” Acemoglu, a Turkish-American professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Robinson, a British professor at the University of Chicago, argue that some nations are richer than others because of their political institutions. and economical.
The book begins with a comparison of living standards in two cities called Nogales: one in Arizona and another south of the border, in the Sonora region of Mexico. While some economists argued that differences in climate, agriculture and culture have a huge impact on the prosperity of a place, Acemoglu and Robinson argue that those who live in Nogales, Arizona, are healthier and wealthier due to the relative strength of their local institutions.
The economics prize is officially known as the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel. Unlike the physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace prizes, it was not instituted by the Swedish industrialist but by the central bank of Sweden in 1968.
Last year, the award went to Claudia Goldin, a professor at Harvard University, for her research on women in the workforce.
Using more than 200 years of data from the United States, Goldin demonstrated how the nature of the gender pay gap has changed over time. Historically, much of the gap could be explained by differences in education and occupation. But in more recent history, she found, most of the gap has been between men and women in the same occupation, and it largely emerges when a woman has her first child.
