LIST OF NOBEL LAUREATES IN ECONOMICS

List of Nobel Memorial Prize laureates in Economics

Collected by Dr.Debesh Bhowmik 

 

The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, officially known as The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (Swedish: Sveriges riksbanks pris i ekonomisk vetenskap till Alfred Nobels minne), is awarded annually by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to researchers in the field of economics. Although not one of the original five Nobel Prizes established by the 1895 will of Alfred Nobel, it is consistently identified with them. The award was established and funded in 1968 by the Sveriges Riksbank, the central bank of Sweden, on the 300th anniversary of the bank, and has been awarded annually since. The first award was given in 1969 to Ragnar Frisch and Jan Tinbergen. Each recipient receives a medal, a diploma and a monetary award that has varied throughout the years. In 1969, Frisch and Tinbergen were given a combined 375,000 SEK, which is equivalent to 2,871,041 SEK in December 2007. The award is presented in Stockholm at an annual ceremony on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death.

As of late 2013, 45 Nobel Memorial Prizes in Economic Sciences have been given to 74 individuals. Seven awards have been given for contributions to the field of macroeconomics, more than any other category. The institution with the most affiliated Nobel laureates in Economics is the University of Chicago, which has 28 affiliated laureates.

Laureates

Year	Laureate		Country	Rationale
1969		Ragnar Frisch	Norway	"for having developed and applied dynamic models for the analysis of economic processes"
		Jan Tinbergen	Netherlands
1970		Paul Samuelson	United States	"for the scientific work through which he has developed static and dynamic economic theory and actively contributed to raising the level of analysis in economic science"
1971		Simon Kuznets	United States	"for his empirically founded interpretation of economic growth which has led to new and deepened insight into the economic and social structure and process of development"
1972		John Hicks	United Kingdom	"for their pioneering contributions to general economic equilibrium theory and welfare theory."
		Kenneth Arrow	United States
1973		Wassily Leontief	Soviet Union	"for the development of the input-output method and for its application to important economic problems"
1974		Gunnar Myrdal	Sweden	"for their pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for their penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena."
		Friedrich Hayek	United Kingdom / Austria
1975		Leonid Kantorovich	Soviet Union	"for their contributions to the theory of optimum allocation of resources"
		Tjalling Koopmans	United States / Netherlands
1976		Milton Friedman	United States	"for his achievements in the fields of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilisation policy"
1977		Bertil Ohlin	Sweden	"for their pathbreaking contribution to the theory of international trade and international capital movements"
		James Meade	United Kingdom
1978		Herbert A. Simon	United States	"for his pioneering research into the decision-making process within economic organizations"
1979		Theodore Schultz	United States	"for their pioneering research into economic development research with particular consideration of the problems of developing countries."
		Arthur Lewis	United Kingdom
1980		Lawrence Klein	United States	"for the creation of econometric models and the application to the analysis of economic fluctuations and economic policies"
1981		James Tobin	United States	"for his analysis of financial markets and their relations to expenditure decisions, employment, production and prices"
1982		George Stigler	United States	"for his seminal studies of industrial structures, functioning of markets and causes and effects of public regulation"
1983		Gérard Debreu	France	"for having incorporated new analytical methods into economic theory and for his rigorous reformulation of the theory of general equilibrium"
1984		Richard Stone	United Kingdom	"for having made fundamental contributions to the development of systems of national accounts and hence greatly improved the basis for empirical economic analysis"
1985		Franco Modigliani	Italy	"for his pioneering analyses of saving and of financial markets"
1986		James M. Buchanan	United States	"for his development of the contractual and constitutional bases for the theory of economic and political decision-making"
1987		Robert Solow	United States	"for his contributions to the theory of economic growth"
1988		Maurice Allais	France	"for his pioneering contributions to the theory of markets and efficient utilization of resources"
1989		Trygve Haavelmo	Norway	"for his clarification of the probability theory foundations of econometrics and his analyses of simultaneous economic structures"
1990		Harry Markowitz	United States	"for their pioneering work in the theory of financial economics"
		Merton Miller	United States
		William Forsyth Sharpe	United States
1991		Ronald Coase	United Kingdom	"for his discovery and clarification of the significance of transaction costs and property rights for the institutional structure and functioning of the economy"
1992		Gary Becker	United States	"for having extended the domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behaviour and interaction, including non-market behaviour"
1993		Robert Fogel	United States	"for having renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic and institutional change"
		Douglass North	United States
1994		John Harsanyi	United States	"for their pioneering analysis of equilibria in the theory of non-cooperative games."
		John Forbes Nash	United States
		Reinhard Selten	Germany
1995		Robert Lucas, Jr.	United States	"for having developed and applied the hypothesis of rational expectations, and thereby having transformed macroeconomic analysis and deepened our understanding of economic policy"
1996		James Mirrlees	United Kingdom	"for their fundamental contributions to the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information"
		William Vickrey	United States / Canada
1997		Robert C. Merton	United States	"for a new method to determine the value of derivatives."
		Myron Scholes	Canada / United States
1998		Amartya Sen	India	"for his contributions to welfare economics"
1999		Robert Mundell	Canada	"for his analysis of monetary and fiscal policy under different exchange rate regimes and his analysis of optimum currency areas"
2000		James Heckman	United States	"for his development of theory and methods for analyzing selective samples"
		Daniel McFadden	United States	"for his development of theory and methods for analyzing discrete choice"
2001		George Akerlof	United States	"for their analyses of markets with asymmetric information"
		Michael Spence	United States
		Joseph E. Stiglitz	United States
2002		Daniel Kahneman	Israel / United States	"for having integrated insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty"
		Vernon L. Smith	United States	"for having established laboratory experiments as a tool in empirical economic analysis, especially in the study of alternative market mechanisms"
2003		Robert F. Engle	United States	"for methods of analyzing economic time series with time-varying volatility (ARCH)"
		Clive Granger	United Kingdom	"for methods of analyzing economic time series with common trends (cointegration)"
2004		Finn E. Kydland	Norway	"for their contributions to dynamic macroeconomics: the time consistency of economic policy and the driving forces behind business cycles."
		Edward C. Prescott	United States
2005		Robert Aumann	Israel / United States	"for having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis."
		Thomas Schelling	United States
2006		Edmund Phelps	United States	"for his analysis of intertemporal tradeoffs in macroeconomic policy"
2007		Leonid Hurwicz	Poland / United States	"for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory"
		Eric Maskin	United States
		Roger Myerson	United States
2008		Paul Krugman	United States	"for his analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity"
2009		Elinor Ostrom	United States	"for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons"
		Oliver Williamson	United States	"for his analysis of economic governance, especially the boundaries of the firm"
2010		Peter A. Diamond	United States	"for their analysis of markets with search frictions"
		Dale T. Mortensen	United States
		Christopher A. Pissarides	Cyprus
2011		Thomas J. Sargent	United States	"for their empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy"
		Christopher A. Sims	United States
2012		Alvin E. Roth	United States	"for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design."
		Lloyd S. Shapley	United States
2013		Eugene Fama	United States	"for their empirical analysis of asset prices."
		Lars Peter Hansen	United States
		Robert J. Shiller	United States

INDIA-BRAZIL-SOUTH AFRICA:THE SOUTHERN TRADE POWERHOUSE MAKES ITS DEBUT

 

INDIA-BRAZIL-SOUTH AFRICA: THE SOUTHERN TRADE POWERHOUSE MAKES ITS DEBUT

By: COHA Research Associate Kaia Lai

March 15, 2006 · in Brazil, Front Page, Press Releases

• New alliance of regional giants slowly gains strength
• India, Brazil, and South Africa (IBSA) spearheads south-south co-operation
• IBSA presses issues of poor nations’ development in WTO and UN debates
• Economic cooperation remains the largest challenge
• Only another elite debating society?

In the face of mounting pressures to develop an alternative option to globalization—one that emerges from a developing world perspective and prioritizes egalitarian advancement, technological cooperation, and an end to global marginalization of the poor nations—there has been a new push to redefine political and economic arrangements springing from Bretton Woods. One component of these many recent initiatives is the idea of south-south cooperation. This southern perspective, while not a new concept, has by no means even been partially realized.

The fostering of transatlantic links between South Africa and Latin America began in the post apartheid period with the creation of the Zone of Peace and Cooperation in the South Atlantic (ZPCSA) in 1986, and recently, steps have been taken to vitalize this incipient southern alliance. The foundation for this was set when the leaders of three regional goliaths, India’s Vajpayee, Brazil’s Lula, and South Africa’s Mbeki spearheaded a new approach to south-south cooperation at the 2003 UN General Assembly Forum, resulting in a trilateral India-Brazil-South Africa agreement.

These countries have initiated a dialogue based on mutual enrichment for the developing world, and are increasingly prioritizing the entrance of developing countries into the competitive world market through loosening their bonds with the U.S. and other rich nations, while forging stronger ties amongst themselves. Yet, IBSA is still merely an infant body that has yet to even fully tally up its objectives. Although, politically it boasts the outline of a bold international stance, IBSA’s future viability relies on its reaching beyond moral and symbolic congruencies to enter into bold trade and technological cooperation ventures among themselves and other developing societies.

Conceptualizing IBSA
A trilateral agreement seems like a logical step for countries that are preparing to go beyond merely committing themselves to amplifying their emotional, political and historical relations. South Africa and Brazil had shared similar histories of racial tension, inherent inequality, and abnormally high Gini indexes (Brazil is currently sitting at 59.7 [2004 est.] and South Africa at 59.3 [1995 est.], based on a scale from 1 to 100, with 100 marking the most economically unequal society). South African and Indian relations date back at least to Mahatma Ghandi’s work for the rights of indentured Indian laborers sent to South Africa a century ago, India’s support of South Africa’s long struggle against apartheid, and the development of the Indian National Congress, with its important solidarity links to the African National Congress (the dominant South African party today). Furthermore, an existing bilateral preferential trade agreement between the South African Community (SACU) and South America’s MERCOSUR (which is now being expanded to encompass liaison connections between India and MERCOSUR), along with a strong legacy of trade between South Africa and India, make for an increasingly important partnership.

IBSA as a Political Cause
The initial purpose of IBSA was to create a loose alliance that could present a cohesive voice at the bargaining sessions anticipated for the Doha Rounds, and which would exert pressure on the rich nations in order to achieve common positions in UN Security Council deliberations. IBSA has further amplified its presence in an annual dialogue involving the foreign ministers of India, Brazil, and South Africa to discuss the development issues and the possibility of joint approaches in dealing with the Eight Millennium Development Goals, which the IBSA members actively support.

The foreign ministers of India, Brazil, and South Africa attended the first IBSA Dialogue Forum, held in New Delhi on March 4 and 5 of 2004. Issues addressed included social development, disarmament, infrastructure, health care, sustainable economic development, and poverty alleviation. The ministers supported the integration of bilateral preferential trade agreements among the three members into one trilateral agreement, stressing the goal of mobilizing multilateral processes in the globalizing world that could be seen as sympathetic to the south.

The second IBSA Dialogue Forum, held in Cape Town on March 10 to 11 of 2005, reaffirmed the issues presented in the first dialogue and focused on IBSA’s potential influence on the global political and economic scene. At Cape Town, the ministers discussed the need for UN reform, equitable WTO treatment of developing nations, south-south political cooperation, development, and economic integration. Environmental issues such as sustainable development and mobilizing an integrated response to issues such as climate change were revisited, as were geopolitical factors such as the non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. Poverty alleviation also remained of great concern for the ministers, who pledged to donate modest contributions to the IBSA development fund to support projects aimed at improving living standards. And while the financial heft of this fund remains relatively inconsequential, its symbolic meaning, following the trend of IBSA itself, is quite substantial. The third meeting was scheduled for this month, and its outcome will hopefully give a clearer indication of the organization’s future path.

Since its inception in 2003, IBSA has progressed from a loose partnership constructed mainly to address political issues in macro terms, to a functioning alliance that seeks to discuss and resolve specific worldwide questions prevalent among developing countries. These include the growth of democracy, disarmament, environmental sustainability, and maritime ties that have emerged as some of the principle agenda items for discussion among the three nations. Garth le Pere, Director of the Institute for Global Dialogue, and Lyal White, Latin American researcher at the South African Institute for International Affairs (SAIIA), claim that the “common challenges of poverty alleviation, economic development and social equity” hold the coalition together. In fact, soon after its inception, IBSA partnered with the UNDP to develop a trust fund to financially back the goal of worldwide poverty alleviation. Meanwhile, we are witnessing the slow but very important institutionalization of that body.

IBSA’s three members are universally seen as being the principle powers in their respective parts of the world and are, therefore, in a position to comprehend their weaker neighbors’ needs in current trade deliberations. Although IBSA’s goals are similar to those of organizations like the G20 and G77, it has the potential to act more effectively, as decisions will be debated among three countries, rather than twenty, or even seventy. In an interview with COHA, Derek Moyo, Deputy Chief of Mission at South Africa’s Washington DC embassy, stressed that IBSA is a much more efficient body than larger forums, and may have a greater capability to impact the UN Security Council by playing a balancing role against that body’s five permanent members—the U.S., China, France, the Russian Federation, and the U.K.

Barriers to a Single Market
IBSA, as a unifying factor in the international community, has performed well in the political arena, effectively negotiating at various trade summits. However, the trilateral agreement has yet to achieve critical mass in the institutionalization process. While IBSA possesses substantial symbolic heft, more concrete achievements must be made in its future. Although India, Brazil, and South Africa participate in bilateral trade amongst themselves, binding trilateral free trade arrangements between the countries are not an option at the present time because of previously signed multinational agreements involving their neighboring nations. Organizations such as SACU and MERCOSUR prohibit individual members from forming a free trade agreement with any outside nation without extending the newly expanded free trade area and its benefits to other existing members.

Existing restrictions on imports and tariffs are quite high; for example, Brazil imposes a flat 60 percent tax on all manufactured imports. Additionally, Argentina, a MERCOSUR partner, is apprehensive of South Africa’s wine industry flooding the South American market. In Moyo’s opinion, opening up trade within IBSA would be beneficial overall, but would require a long and intricate process of targeted negotiations to reassure the security of existing business interests within each nation. If, in the future, the IBSA countries decide to create a broadened free trade agreement, it may come to fruition in the form of a multilateral SACU, MERCOSUR, and ASEAN agreement. According to the SAIIA, IBSA encompasses a total population of 1.3 billion people and an economy of $1.26 trillion. The above numbers would be only a fraction of the potential combined population and economy that would come into existence if current regional blocs were incorporated into one gigantic grouping. However, at this time, the foundations for such a move are shaky at best, and it appears unlikely that a larger south-south alliance will be permitted to emerge at this point.

Impediments to Bloc Building
There have been no trilateral free, or even preferential, trade ties among the three members. In fact, South Africa’s trade with Brazil comprises only 2 percent of its total foreign trade. One research institute from each country—the SAIIA, the Indian Consumer Unity and Trust Society (CUTS), and the Brazilian Institute for International Trade—have been entrusted with the responsibility of conducting research and compiling reports for their upcoming summit addressing the benefits and repercussions associated with openly linking the members’ economies into a single market. This project has included a survey of public and private sector responses to a possible trade pact. Some claim that there is a lack of communication between public and private sectors with respect to IBSA’s ability to significantly affect the current markets. Moyo explains that, when discussing a trade arrangement, there are always certain sectors that will protest relaxed trade barriers for self-serving reasons. For IBSA to expand into complex trade relationships, business sectors located in the three countries will have to be prepared to cooperate with each other in creating rationalized trade arrangements that could prove mutually beneficial.

Furthermore, South Africa significantly trails the other two countries in exports, especially those relating to value-added commodities. In fact, export flows from MERCOSUR to South Africa are five times larger than the reverse, and, specifically with Brazil, South Africa’s trade is at a disadvantage of one to four. Although South Africa’s per capita income tops India’s and Brazil’s, its economy is less than one-third the size of other two. Additionally, South Africa’s total trade at $70 billion is around $60 billion less than either India’s or Brazil’s. Moreover, South Africa faces other trade disadvantages with both of its partners, from an economic as well as an efficiency standpoint. However, Moyo claims that opening the borders of the three countries will help South Africa to catch up in its manufacturing sector. He acknowledges that “their export packages have more manufactured goods than ours…and ours is still predominantly made of minerals…[but] it is that dynamic that we want to change…because it’s companies that do business, not governments.” Some international business specialists maintain that South Africa has the greatest potential to benefit from the export of its agricultural products, auto parts, and chemicals. But as of yet, IBSA’s economic components have been built on existing bilateral agreements some at the encouragement of the three countries’ business sectors, which have met such integration prospects with enthusiasm.

Current Initiatives
While a preferential trade pact in the near future is still far from certain, IBSA nevertheless has made strides elsewhere. In the tourism industry, many are seeing the idea of IBSA’s existence as providing a compelling opportunity and a strong selling point. According to Nalini Gupta, head of the South African Airlines (SAA) branch in India, regional airlines are looking into tri-destination travel packages, and SAA is already expanding its flights among the three nations.
At the beginning of March, IBSA agreed to forge cooperation in the agricultural sectors and technology. The Indian daily, New Kerala, states that the two-day trilateral discussions held last month produced an agreement to work collectively on agricultural issues such as “germplasm exchange and enhancement; research and technology including plant breeding for sustainable food production; nutritional and environmental security; use of frontier technologies for livestock and poultry health management, and breeding quality improvement; efficient management of natural resources; technology transfer-capacity and competence building; fish augmentation of productivity and value addition through processing and small farm mechanization and agro processing tools and techniques.” At the meeting, a draft of an official agricultural cooperative agreement was circulated and will be voted upon by the three governments in this month’s annual IBSA summit.

Agriculture has always been a sore subject for developing countries, mainly because of Washington’s insistence on maintaining its federal subsidy program. Developing countries have suffered an estimated $100 billion in annual loses due to limited sales resulting from the developed countries’ agriculture subsidy programs. IBSA has helped to lead the fight against such inequalities, taking strong stances over the issue at WTO meetings. In negotiations last October, the U.S. for the first time, agreed to consider lowering its agricultural subsidies after years of pushing the EU to lower theirs. At an IBSA colloquium on October 2005, Satyabrata Pal, India’s High Commissioner to the organization, expressed IBSA’s potential ability to influence the path of the Doha Round. He claimed that “we were able to make [a] common cause in the Doha Round of WTO talks, and that made it impossible for the EU and U.S. to force on the developing world a deal cobbled together between them.” IBSA, along with the G4 (comprising India, Brazil, South Africa, and China) and the G20, has been instrumental in an effort to develop a “middle ground” on trade negotiations. And it seems to be determined to continue along this path, as demonstrated by Minister of State for External Affairs Anand Sharma’s visit to Brazil earlier last month to further discuss proposed UN reforms.

What does the future hold?
Unique as a transcontinental agreement among several far-flung members of the developing world appears to be, IBSA seems to have less common political ground than your average regional organization. However, the three countries have linked what they do have in common, namely socio-economic conditions and political positions within their respective regions, to promote their internal strengths. In order to tailor a mutually beneficial framework, IBSA can be effective if the organization focuses on commonly held issues and works to realize goals within spelled-out categories. IBSA has been, and will likely continue to be, an increasingly successful political format representing the interests of these three emerging regional behemoths with worldwide responsibilities.

Satyabrata Pal admonishes his listeners that IBSA should not be merely another “diplomatic debating society.” However, its expansion into being a transcending factor in global trade seems to be some distance off, as a preferential trade agreement will have to be negotiated, not just between the IBSA countries, but among their likeminded counterparts in other free trade relationships as well. Overall, IBSA has yet to discover its final identity, and this disclosure will go a long way to determine the future viability of global-south synergy as embodied in IBSA. Yet, the headway that these countries are making is quite impressive. By tapping into interdependency among the most capable states to be found in three southern geographic areas, IBSA is helping to lead relations between the new organization and other developing countries to be found within their respective geographical regions, while working to solve a variety of ills and socio-economic problems plaguing both their immediate and more distant neighbors.