A scientific approach to reducing poverty's many harmful effects via field experiments in schools and other realworld settings has won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
Economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, both of MIT,and Michael Kremer of Harvard University will receive equal shares of the prize of 9 million Swedish kronor.Duflo is only the second woman ever to be awarded the economics Nobel. "Poverty has deep roots,and we use an experimental approach to examine particular aspects of this problem and determine what interventions (干预) work," Duflo said.
More than 700 million people globally live in extreme poverty. Half of the world's children leave school without basic language or math skills. Roughly 5 million children under age 5 annually die from diseases that could have been prevented with inexpensive treatments.
The three winners design and test interventions aimed at specific ways to alleviate poverty's effects on education, health care and other areas.Such studies are especially important because policies intended to fight poverty can often cause opposite results.
In the mid1990s, Kremer led a team that tested a range of interventions aimed at improving learning among students attending schools in western Kenya. Banerjee and Duflo, often with Kremer,then performed similar studies in other countries.One important line of research developed "Teaching at the Right Level" programs, which enable teachers in lowincome, developing nations to target instruction to students' learning levels. Teachers in these programs learn ways to keep students from falling behind rather than forcing them through a onesizefitsall curriculum for each grade.
A 2011 study led by Duflo, for instance, found that grade 1 test scores in a Kenyan school increased when teachers divided students into smaller classes based on their initial learning levels.
A string of studies in the same vein led by the 2019 winners took randomized controlled trials and field experiments from ignored status to standard practice in developing nations.
These studies showed that the virtually unanswerable question "How can we fight global poverty?" could be broken into smaller,testable questions such as "Why do children not attend school?" and "Why do smallscale farmers not use technologies such as modern seeds and fertilizer (肥料) that are known to be profitable?"