Official winning image of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics

The last of this year's Nobel Prizes to be issued is out. The 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics has been awarded to three American professors.

On October 14, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that MIT Professor Daron Acemoglu, MIT Professor Simon Johnson, and University of Chicago Professor James A. Robinson were joint recipients of the prize for their “studying how institutions shape and influence prosperity.” These honorees have produced innovative research on the factors that influence a nation's economic prosperity over the long term.

Daron Asimoglu, born in 1967 in Istanbul, Turkey, received his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 1992, and is currently a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where his research includes macroeconomics and political economy, and he is the author of a number of best-selling books. James A. Robinson, born in 1960, received his Ph.D. from Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA in 1993, and is currently a professor at the University of Chicago, Illinois, USA.

The two have co-authored books Economic Analysis of Political Development: The Economic Origins of Autocracy and Democracy and Why Nations Fail, the latter of which was published and has generated a lively debate in political sociology, economics, and history.

Why Nations Fail begins with the story of a small town, Nogales. Nogales straddles two countries separated by a fence, the north belonging to the U.S. state of Arizona and the south to Mexico. Although the people, geography, and cultural backgrounds are the same on both sides of the border line, after the last two to three hundred years, the neighbors a few feet away are in a completely different situation. One is prosperous while the other is still in poverty. The conclusion is that institutions are decisive, and that economic and political systems determine whether a country will prosper or decline.

Simon Johnson, born in 1963 in Sheffield, England, graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a PhD in 1989. He was previously the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and has published books such as “Fire in the White House: U.S. Debt, Where It Came From, Where It's Going”. He is also a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), as is Daron Asimoglu.

The Nobel Prize in Economics dates back as far as 1968. At that time, the Swedish Central Bank (Sveriges Riksbank) established the economics prize in honor of Nobel Prize founder Alfred Nobel. Between 1969 and 2023, the Nobel Prize in Economics has been awarded 55 times, giving rise to 93 winners, including three women. According to statistics, the youngest of the 93 winners is Esther Duflo, one of the 2019 winners, who is 46 years old, and the oldest is Leonid Hurwicz, one of the 2007 winners, who is 90 years old.