The Nobel Prize in economics has been awarded for work on technology’s impact on sustained economic growth.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on Monday that the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025 would be shared among American-Israeli Joel Mokyr, France’s Philippe Aghion and Canada’s Peter Howitt “for having explained innovation-driven economic growth”.
The award was based on the idea that vast numbers of people have been lifted out of poverty over the past two centuries as the world has seen sustained economic growth with technology the underlying cause. Previously, stagnation was the norm throughout most of human history, the jury said in a statement.
Mokyr, a professor at Northwestern University in the United States, won half of the prize for using historical records to identify what changed during the Industrial Revolution.
His research showed lasting growth depends on grasping why technologies function, not merely observing that they do. Before that understanding developed during the Industrial Revolution, it was difficult to build upon new discoveries and inventions.
Aghion, from College de France and The London School of Economics, and Howitt, from Brown University in the US, share the other half of the prize “for the theory of sustained growth through creative destruction,” the jury said.
In an article published in 1992, they developed a mathematical framework for “creative destruction,” a concept popularised by Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter in the early 1900s, describing how new products replace old ones in the marketplace.
The award has a total cash prize of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1.2m), which Mokyr will split with Aghion and Howitt.
The economics prize wraps up this year’s Nobel season, which honoured research into the human immune system, practical applications of quantum mechanics and the development of new forms of molecular architecture.
Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado was awarded the highly watched Nobel Peace Prize.
She surprised many when she dedicated it to US President Donald Trump, who had made no secret of the fact that he thought he deserved it.
The economics prize is the only Nobel not among the original five created in the will of Swedish scientist Alfred Nobel, who died in 1896.
It was instead created through a donation from the Swedish central bank in 1968, leading detractors to dub it “a false Nobel”.
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