Three academics based in the United States -- Daron Acemoglu from Turkey and Simon Johnson and James Robinson from Britain -- won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics for research that explored the aftermath of colonisation, to understand why inequality persists even till today, especially in countries that are dogged by corruption and dictatorship. According to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences release: “This year’s laureates in the economic sciences -- Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson -- have demonstrated the importance of societal institutions for a country’s prosperity. Societies with a poor rule of law and institutions that exploit the population do not generate growth or change for the better.
The laureates’ research helps us to understand why.” Prof. Acemoglu is the base of the triangular partnership linking the two Britons.
He is an economics professor at MIT. He co-authored with James Robinson (then at Harvard University) and . In 2023, he co-authored with Simon Johnson the book .
But their foundational work together began in 2004 when in a joint paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson empirically and theoretically demonstrated that economic institutions play a fundamental role in the differences in economic development around the world. They postulated that: “Economic institutions encouraging economic growth emerge when political institutions allocate power to groups with interests in b.
