Public Lecture

Prof. Partha Pratim Majumder, President, IASc, will chair this session.

Getting out of a poverty trap

One of humanity’s most urgent issues is the reduction of global poverty, in all its forms. Abhijit Banerjee shared the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2019 with Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer for having introduced a new approach to obtaining reliable answers about the best ways to fight global poverty. It involves dividing this issue into smaller, more manageable, questions. Since the mid-1990s, they have been able to test a range of interventions in different areas using field experiments, for example for improving educational outcomes or child health.