The winners of the Swedish National Bank’s Alfred Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for 2024 are American scientists Daron Adjemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson, who have studied the formation of social institutions and their impact on the development of countries, the Swedish Academy of Sciences reported.
The laureates showed that one explanation for differences in the prosperity of countries is the social institutions that emerged during their colonisation, which in some cases were shaped into inclusive political and economic systems for the long-term benefit of European migrants, resulting in generally prosperous populations over time. The academics emphasised:
“This is an important reason why former colonies that were once rich have now become poor, and vice versa.”
The Prize in Economic Sciences, unlike the other Nobel Prizes, was not established by Alfred Nobel but by the Swedish National Bank in 1968. It has been awarded since 1969. In 2023, its winner was American researcher Claudia Goldin, who, as the committee noted, was the first to present a comprehensive report on women’s earnings and their role in the labour market in a historical context.
The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine was awarded on October 7 to Victor Ambros and Gary Ravkan of the US for their research on the guiding role of microRNAs. The Nobel Prize in Physics on 8 October was shared by John Hopfield from the US and Geoffrey Hinton from the UK for developing machine learning methods. On October 9, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Americans David Baker and John Jumper and the UK’s Demis Hassabis for the study of protein structures.
The Nobel Prize for Literature on October 10 was awarded to writer Han Kang of South Korea with the wording “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.” The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded on October 11 to Nihon Hidankyo, a Japanese NGO advocating global nuclear disarmament.
