Stockholm (AFP)

The Nobel Prize for Economics was awarded Monday to a trio of researchers specializing in the fight against poverty, including Franco-American Esther Duflo, the second woman distinguished in the discipline and youngest laureate in the history of this award.

Esther Duflo, 46, her American Indian husband Abhijit Banerjee and American Michael Kremer "have introduced a new (experimental) approach to get reliable answers on the best way to reduce poverty in the world," he said. in Stockholm the secretary general of the Royal Academy of Sciences, Göran Hansson.

In the mid-1990s, Michael Kremer, 54, a professor at Harvard University, "demonstrated how powerful this approach can be by using field experiments to test various interventions that can improve educational outcomes in the classroom." western Kenya, "says the Academy.

Esther Duflo made a name for herself by conducting research with Abhijit Banerjee, 58, her thesis supervisor, on poor communities in India and Africa, to measure the real impact of micro-policies. Their experimental research methods now dominate the development economy.

Thanks to them, "more than five million children in India have benefited from effective support programs in schools" and "many countries have made important grants for preventive medicine," says the academy.

"Despite recent and significant improvements," she said, however, "one of humanity's most pressing challenges is the reduction of poverty in the world, in all its forms." Some 700 million people still live in extreme poverty, according to the World Bank.

- Duflo, youngest of the prize winners -

Esther Duflo, professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is one of the most celebrated economists in the world, especially in the United States. Recipient of the 2010 John Bates Clark Medal, she is only the second woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Economics after American Elinor Ostrom in 2009.

"I'm very honored, to be honest, I did not think it was possible to win the Nobel as young," said the economist who becomes 46 years the youngest of the winners of the economy and the fourth French sacred after Jean Tirole (2014), Maurice Allais (1988) and Gérard Debreu (1983).

The only honored woman of the Nobel 2019 edition, her work earned her in 2013 to be chosen by the White House to advise President Barack Obama on development issues by sitting on the new Committee for Global Development.

"Our vision of poverty is dominated by caricatures and clichés," she told AFP in an interview in September 2017.

Asked in English on Monday what she will do the sum of nine million Swedish kronor (about 830,000 euros) to share between the winners, the Franco-American replied: "At the age of 8 or 9 years, I I've read a biography of Marie Curie, and when she got her first Nobel Prize she bought a gram of radium (?) I guess we're going to discuss all three to find out what will be our radium gram. "

Emmanuel Macron praised on Twitter the "magnificent Nobel Prize" which "recalls that French economists are currently at the best world level and shows that research in this area can have a concrete impact on the welfare of humanity."

- A season without polemics -

After an extraordinary 2018 edition because of the postponement of the prize for literature, the Nobel 2019 season has not raised any passions or provoked controversy beyond the consecration of the Austrian writer Peter Handke.

The author of "The Anguish of the goalkeeper at the time of the penalty" is hated in part of the Balkans for his pro-Serb positions and his presence in 2006 at the funeral of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, accused of crimes against humanity and genocide.

As expected by the critics, the 2018 Literature Prize postponed one year after a #MeToo sex-trafficking scandal came back to a woman, the Polish Olga Tokarczuk.

As for the most prestigious Nobel Prize winner, the peace prize announced in Oslo, he went to Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, the architect of a spectacular reconciliation with the former Eritrean enemy brother.

The awards are presented to their recipients at ceremonies in Stockholm and Oslo on December 10, the anniversary of the death of their creator, the Swedish industrialist and philanthropist Alfred Nobel (1833-1896).

In a will written a year before his death, the inventor of dynamite had wished to see rewarded "those who over the past year have rendered humanity the greatest services."

© 2019 AFP