Nobel Prize For Economics 2024 Awarded To Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson And James A Robinson
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the Nobel prize for economics 2024 to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson And James A Robinson for “studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity”.
Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson have contributed innovative research about what affects countries’ economic prosperity in the long run.
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The laureates in their research has found that the differences in countries’ prosperity is the societal institutions that were introduced during colonization. The awardees examined European’s colonisation of large part of the globe and found out the disparities. They have discovered that the political and economic systems that the colonisers have introduced led to reversal of fortune, that is the richest countries at the time of colonisation are now among the poorest.
The laureates model for understanding how political institutions are created and transformed consists of three key components. The first is the conflict over how resources are allocated and who holds decision-making power in a society. The second is the masses sometimes have the opportunity to exercise power by mobilising and threatening the ruling elite; power in a society is thus more than the power to make decisions and lastly, it is the commitment problem, which means that the only alternative is for the elite to hand over decision-making power to the populace.
Moreover, the laureates also developed an innovative theoretical framework that explains some societies become stuck in a trap and they called them to be extractive institutions and why escaping from the trap is difficult. However, the laureates claims that the change is possible and the new institutions can be formed.
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The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel has been awarded 56 times to 96 laureates between 1969 and 2024.
