The 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to economists Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A Robinson on Monday for their work on the formation of societal institutions and its effect on prosperity.

The jury said that the three economists were being given the accolade, officially called the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences, as they have demonstrated why “societies with a poor rule of law and institutions that exploit the population do not generate growth or change for the better”.

It added that the work done by Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson has shown that one of the explanations for differences in countries’ prosperity is the “societal institutions that were introduced during colonisation”.

Jakob Svensson, Chair of the Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences, said that reducing the vast differences in income between countries was one of “our time’s greatest challenges”.

While Acemoglu and Johnson are professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States, Robinson is a professor at the University of Chicago. All three will collectively receive a prize amount of 11 million Swedish kronor, or about Rs 8.2 crore.

In 2023, the Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to economic historian Claudia Goldin for her work on the gender gap in the labour market.

On October 7, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for their discovery of a fundamental principle governing how gene activity is regulated.

Scientists John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton on October 8 won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on machine learning that paved the way for the current boom in Artificial Intelligence technologies.

A day later, scientists David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John M Jumper were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on protein structure prediction.

The Nobel Prize in Literature was on October 10 awarded to South Korean novelist Han Kang “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”.

The 2024 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded on Friday to the Japanese organisation Nihon Hidankyo for its efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons.