Finding practical solutions to alleviate poverty, testing them and demonstrating, data in hand, whether they work. That is the approach that earned the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics.
Alleviating poverty: this is the great theme at the heart of the studies carried out by Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer, recipients of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics. It is in fact the only prize that was not established at the beginning of the twentieth century at the behest of Alfred Nobel himself, but much later, in 1969, on the initiative of the Swedish central bank. In explaining its choice, the Swedish Academy placed emphasis on the fact that the three academics went in search of simple, practical and affordable solutions to specific problems.
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Their method – as Esther Duflo herself explained during a TED Talk – takes its cue from randomised controlled trials, which revolutionised medicine: a given drug is administered to one group, while a second group with similar characteristics receives a placebo. If the first group achieves results and the second does not, this means the drug works. According to Duflo, "you can apply to social innovations the same rigorous scientific tests that we use for drugs. And in this way, you can make policy decisions less speculative by knowing what works, what doesn't work, and why."
The Swedish Academy cited an experiment carried out by Michael Kremer together with some colleagues in a rural area of Kenya, which contradicts the hypothesis (put forward in the literature) that providing textbooks is sufficient to improve students' average scores in assessment tests. In reality, the paper argues, books only benefit students who already have a solid foundation of skills, leaving all the others behind — those who come from more difficult backgrounds and do not have a good command of English. Building on this evidence, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo tested innovative teaching models with two groups of students in India, achieving positive and lasting results.
How can vaccination campaigns be made more effective and widespread in the most at-risk countries? This is another question to which Banerjee and Duflo in particular dedicated themselves. Speaking to a TED audience, Duflo talked about the district of Udaipur in Rajasthan, where approximately one per cent of children had completed all the required vaccines. In thirty villages, the researchers organised a dedicated health camp every month, and the number of vaccinated children rose to 17 per cent, compared to 6 per cent in the control group. By giving one kilogram of lentils to each participating family, the figure reached as high as 38 per cent.
As the New York Times points out, the newly crowned Nobel laureates in Economics sought to make their approach as widely known as possible. Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, who are husband and wife, founded the international network Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (or J-Pal) together with Sendhil Mullainathan in 2003, which has since been joined by 181 university professors from around the world. The research centre aims to provide governments with robust scientific evidence on poverty to serve as the basis for public interventions. The project is supported, among others, by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation.
