Nobel economics prize winners explore how country's institutions affect prosperity

This year's Nobel memorial prize in economics has gone to Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and James Robinson of the University of Chicago for their work on why there are such vast differences in prosperity between nations.

While announcing the award, Jakob Svensson, the chairman of the economics prize committee, said: "Reducing the huge differences in income between countries is one of our times' greatest challenges." The economists' "groundbreaking research" has given us a "much deeper understanding of the root causes of why countries fail or succeed."

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