Scot wins Nobel prize for economics

A Scottish economist Angus Deaton has won the Nobel memorial prize in economic sciences.

Professor Deaton, who was born in Edinburgh in 1945 and now works at Princeton University in the US, won the famous prize for his work on the links between consumption and income, and how public policy can have an impact on the rich and poor.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said he was being recognised for “his analysis of consumption, poverty and welfare”.

The academic, the son of a Yorkshire miner who later became a civil engineer after studying at night school, holds US and British citizenship, and taught at the universities of Cambridge and Bath before moving to North America.

His Nobel prize comes with a cash prize of 8 million Swedish kronor (£630,000).

The academy said that the 69-year-old academic’s research had been a major influence on policy making, measuring how public behaviour among different social groups is affected by changes such as a rise in the VAT rate on food.

His 2013 book, The Great Escape, looked at the origins of inequality and its effects over 250 years of economic history.

The Nobel committee said: “To design economic policy that promotes welfare and reduces poverty, we must first understand individual consumption choices. More than anyone else, Angus Deaton has enhanced this understanding.

“By linking detailed individual choices and aggregate outcomes, his research has helped transform the fields of microeconomics, macroeconomics, and development economics.”

The economics award is not a Nobel Prize in the same sense as the others – which were created by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel in 1895. Sweden’s central bank added the economics prize in 1968 as a memorial to Nobel.

Mr Deaton described himself as “someone who’s concerned with the poor of the world and how people behave, and what gives them a good life”.

He said he expects extreme poverty in the world to continue decreasing, but is not “blindly optimistic”.

He said he is delighted to have been awarded the prize and was pleased the committee recognised work that concerns the world’s poor.

He noted “tremendous health problems among adults and children in India, where there has been a lot of progress”. He said that half of the children in India are “still malnourished” and “for many people in the world, things are very bad indeed”.

The medicine prize went to three scientists from Japan, the US and China who discovered drugs to fight malaria and other tropical diseases. Japanese and Canadian scientists won the physics prize for discovering tiny particles called neutrinos have mass, and scientists from Sweden, the US and Turkey won the chemistry prize for their research into the way cells repair damaged DNA. Belarusian investigative journalist Svetlana Alexievich won the literature award. The peace prize went to the National Dialogue Quartet in Tunisia for building democracy after the 2011 revolution.