Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer have won the 2019 Nobel Economics Prize for their work in fighting global poverty, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

French-American Duflo becomes only the second female economics winner in the prize’s 50-year history, as well as the youngest at 46. She shared the award equally with Indian-born American Banerjee and Kremer of the US.

The Academy said the work of the three economists had shown how the problem of poverty could be tackled by breaking it down into smaller and more precise questions in areas such as education and health care, making problems easier to tackle.

“As a direct result of one of their studies, more than 5 million Indian children have benefited from effective programmes of remedial tutoring in school,” the Academy said.

Despite recent dramatic improvements, one of humanity’s most urgent issues is the reduction of global poverty, in all its forms. More than 700 million people still subsist on extremely low incomes. Every year, around 5 million children under the age of five still die of diseases that could often have been prevented or cured with inexpensive treatments. Half of the world’s children still leave school without basic literacy and numeracy skills, it said.

This year’s laureates have introduced a new approach to obtaining reliable answers about the best ways to fight global poverty. In brief, it involves dividing this issue into smaller, more manageable, questions - for example, the most effective interventions for improving educational outcomes or child health. They have shown that these smaller, more precise, questions are often best answered via carefully designed experiments among the people who are most affected, it said.

In the mid-1990s, Kremer and his colleagues demonstrated how powerful this approach can be, using field experiments to test a range of interventions that could improve school results in western Kenya, it said.

Banerjee and Duflo, often with Kremer, soon performed similar studies of other issues and in other countries. Their experimental research methods now entirely dominate development economics.

The laureates’ research findings - and those of the researchers following in their footsteps - have dramatically improved our ability to fight poverty in practice. As a direct result of one of their studies, more than 5 million Indian children have benefited from effective programmes of remedial tutoring in schools. Another example is the heavy subsidies for preventive health care that have been introduced in many countries, it said.

These are just two examples of how this new research has already helped to alleviate global poverty. It also has great potential to further improve the lives of the worst-off people around the world, the academy added.

Banerjee is the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at MIT; Duflo is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at MIT and Kremer is the Gates Professor of Developing Societies at Harvard University.

The 9 million Swedish crown economics prize is a later addition to the five awards created in the will of industrialist and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel, established by the Swedish central bank and first awarded in 1969.

The 2018 Nobel Economics Prize was jointly awarded to US economists William Nordhaus and Paul Romer, pioneers in adapting the western economic growth model to focus on environmental issues and sharing the benefits of technology.