Prof. Bannerjee

Submitted by :SUSMITA GHOSHAL(Department of BBA,Batch :2017-2020)

University Registration No: 171522010107

It is blessing to have one more Indian get a Nobel prize,and that too, for work of extreme relevance to India. Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer have been jointly awarded this year's prize for their work in designing measures to combat poverty.

                    Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee was educated at the University of Calcutta, Jawaharlal Nehru University and Harvard University,where he received his Ph.D in 1988. He is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2003 he founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J--PAL), along with Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan, and he remains one of the labs directors. Mr.Banerjee is a Past president of the Bureau for the Research in the Economic Analysis of Development, a Research Associate of the NBER, a CEPR research fellow, International Research Fellow of the Kiel Institute, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society, and has been a Guggenheim Fellow and an Alfred P.Sloan Fellow and a winner of the Infosys prize. He is the author of the large number of articles and four books, including Poor Economics, which won the Goldman Sachs Business Book of the year. He is the editor of three more books and has directed two documentary films. He also served on the U.N. Secretary- General's High- Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda.This year’s awardees take development economics to a new level of offering specific solutions to particular problems of poverty.

The award recognises that fast growth alone will not end poverty in general or its specific manifestations. Within poor countries themselves, things vary across regions and groups more acutely than they vary between rich countries and poor ones. The awardees deploy advances in microeconomic theory to examine the phenomenon. They grapple with human bias and prejudice, which economists call bounded rationality, and insights from the field of information economics and incentives to arrive at specific solutions. Banerjee is director at the Abdul Jamil Lateef Poverty Action Lab, Jaipur, which designs and carries out specific experiments to arrive at solutions to development challenges, whether in education, healthcare, farming or gender relations. One insight from multiple experiments: it makes sense to offer an incentive, say, a bag of lentils, for each child immunised, to lower the cost per child, in an effective campaign of immunisation. Another insight: simply throwing more money at education will not raise quality, while tutoring the laggards would.

Banerjee is not an activist but has not shied away from political positions in favour of liberal democracy and critiquing the government. A Nobel prize might make his dissent palatable. But the point is too appreciate difference of opinion as democracy itself.