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Angus Deaton, WIDER Annual Lecturer 2006, wins Nobel Economics Prize for his work on consumption, poverty, and welfare

On Monday 2 October the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that Professor Angus Deaton was to receive the 2015 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare. 

In explaining their decision the committee highlighted Deaton's work linking detailed individual choices and aggregate outcomes, research which has contributed to the design of economic policy that promotes welfare and reduces poverty and which has transformed the fields of microeconomics, macroeconomics, and development economics.

In 2006 Deaton delivered the WIDER Annual Lecture 10 titled “Global Patterns of Income and Health: Facts, Interpretations, and Policies”. Deaton used his lecture to address the link between health and economic growth, a topic that has major policy implications, not least concerning the extent to which health deficiencies and health inequalities need to be given early priority in development strategies. 

Deaton drew attention to evidence that runs counter to conventional wisdom, pointing out that China after 1980 and India after 1990 showed little or slower improvement in health compared with earlier periods of slower economic growth. He stressed the urgent need to improve our understanding of the factors that cause these counterintuitive results.