HEA’s Secretary General on Nobel Prize winners

This year’s Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences has been awarded in recognition of outstanding research in development economics including the fight against poverty. ‘Remarkably a young female economist, Esther Duflo is also among the laureates this year’, Éva Hegedüs, Secretary General of the Hungarian Economic Association (HEA), Chairperson and CEO of Gránit Bank Zrt. told the MTI.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on Monday that this year’s Nobel Memorial Prize in economics had been awarded to three economists, Abhijit Banerjee (India), Esther Duflo (France) and Michael Kremer (USA) for their efforts to reduce global poverty. As Éva Hegedüs highlighted, one of the most important tasks of economic research is to assist economic politicians through research, analysis and proposed solutions on how to bring welfare to the poverty-stricken communities globally, or to specific regions. ‘This year’s Nobel Prize winners attempted to find solution to this problem also relying on their own empirical experiences’, she explained. Éva Hegedüs emphasized: the recognition of the researchers is justifiable even if hundreds of millions or even billions of people still live on less than a dollar a day across the world. Convergence and the improvement of the quality of life of these people remain among the most significant challenges. ‘It is particularly important because the conditions associated with climate change may further increase food shortages and poverty in numerous already impoverished regions of the world’, the Secretary General of the HEA explained.

She pointed out that this year’s laureates achieved highly promising results in the convergence of the world’s poorest communities. They proved that instead of major global programmes, or even within their framework, smaller-scale local development schemes, training and targeted aid could be effective and efficient in combating poverty and providing better quality of life for the poorest communities in the longer term as well. As she pointed out, ‘the experience could be useful not only in the most impoverished African or Asian countries, but in our region as well. It is a very important area of economic science, and perhaps the most beautiful part of the job is how to make this world better and fairer’, Éva Hegedüs emphasized. (MTI)