Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson are the winners of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics.

According to a Radio France Internationale (RFI)Through their studies, these economists proved that the disparities in wealth between countries can be justified by the good or bad management of their institutions.

Many of the economic disparities identified, studied and justified by economists Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson, which today earned them the Nobel Prize for Economics, come from the European colonization of different parts of the globe. According to these researchers, the current differences in wealth between previously colonized states come from the way in which colonization took place.

Thus, in countries where the colonizers only extracted wealth without any investment in the country's infrastructure, the societies after the end of colonization became impoverished. On the other hand, in so-called inclusive systems, the colonizers improved living conditions in the different states where they wanted to settle people from the metropolis.

For the Swedish Academy, the research of these three American researchers is helping to tackle one of the biggest challenges of our time: reducing the huge income gap between countries. To this end, these three economists have shown how the institutions that administer a state are essential to its economic performance, managing to show mathematically that countries where the rule of law, for example, is weaker, are countries where people are poorer.

This year's laureates have pioneered these demonstrations, both empirically and theoretically, which has considerably advanced understanding of global inequalities, said Jakob Svensson, chairman of the Nobel Committee for Economic Sciences.

Both Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson currently work at MIT in Massachusetts. James Robinson is a professor at the University of Chicago.

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