Abhijit Banerjee Who Awarded The Nobel Prize For Economics 2019 Facts

Indian-American economist Abhijit Banerjee he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics born in Mumbai in 1961, currently holds the post of Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). 

He had founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab along with Esther Duflo and renowned academic Sendhil Mullainathan in 2003, and serves as one of its directors even now.

Mr Banerjee has also written four books and several acclaimed research papers. "Poor Economics", which he co-authored along with Ms Duflo, won the Goldman Sachs Business Book Of The Year award in 2011. Translated into more than 17 global languages, it dwells on the effectiveness of solutions to global poverty using an evidence-based randomised control trial approach.

Banerjee had said that should Congress-led UPA come to power, the NYAY will have to funded by new taxes given the country’s wide fiscal deficit.

“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,” the Nobel Prize Committee said.

“First, there was the potential cost of a massive liquidity crunch, in which the volume or number of economic transactions reduces due to insufficient cash holdings. The brunt of this cost was borne by the informal sector, where 85% or more of the Indian labour force is employed, as transactions here have been traditionally carried out in cash,” Banerjee said in a paper jointly authored with Harvard University’s Namrata Kala.

“Second, one of the stated motivations of the policy was to reduce corruption, yet the value of the highest-denomination bill was doubled, making it easier to pay people illegally with anonymity. Thus, demonetisation seemed more like a one-off penalty on those who were holding large quantities of cash at the time without affecting the future incentives for corruption,” the paper said.

Soon after Mr Banerjee won the Nobel Prize, an outpouring of compliments from political leaders and fellow-academicians flooded social media. While Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal tweeted it as a "big day for every Indian", West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee pointed out that he is an alumnus of the South Point School and Presidency College in Kolkata.