[STOCKHOLM] Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt won the 2025 Nobel economics prize for “having explained innovation-driven economic growth”, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said on Monday (Oct 13).
The prestigious award, formally known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, is the final prize to be given out this year and is worth 11 million Swedish kronor (S$1.5 million).
“The laureates have taught us that sustained growth cannot be taken for granted,” the prize-awarding body said in a statement. Economic stagnation, not growth, has been the norm for most of human history. Their work shows that we must be aware of, and counteract, threats to continued growth.”
Mokyr is a professor at Northwestern University, in Evanston in the US, while Aghion is professor at the College de France and INSeaD, in Paris, and at the London School of Economics and Political Science, in Britain.
Howitt is a professor at Brown University, in Providence in the US.
Mokyr was awarded half the prize with the other half being shared between Aghion and Howitt.
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“Joel Mokyr used historical observations to identify the factors necessary for sustained growth based on technological innovations,” John Hassler, member of the Nobel Committee, said.
“Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt produced a mathematical model of creative destruction, an endless process in which new and better products replace the old.”
The awards for medicine, physics, chemistry, peace and literature were announced last week.
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Those prizes were established in the will of Swedish dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel and have been handed out since 1901, with a few interruptions mostly due to the world wars.
The economics prize was established much later, being given out first in 1969 when it was won by Norway’s Ragnar Frisch and Jan Tinbergen from the Netherlands for work in dynamic economic modelling. Tinbergen’s brother Nikolaas also won a prize, taking home Medicine in 1973.
While few economists are household names, relatively well-known winners include former US Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, and Paul Krugman and Milton Friedman.
Last year’s economics award went to US-based academics Simon Johnson, James Robinson and Daron Acemoglu for research that explored the relationship between colonisation and the establishment of public institutions to explain why some countries have been mired in poverty for decades. REUTERS
