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October 14, 2025<\/p>\n
4 min read<\/p>\n
Economics Nobel Honors Work Linking Scientific Research to Prosperity<\/p>\n
Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt share the Nobel economics prize for work that underlines the importance of investing in research and development<\/p>\n
Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt, winners of the 2025 Economics Nobel prize.<\/p>\n
Northwestern University, Patrick Imbert\/Coll\u00e8ge de France, Ashley McCabe\/Brown University<\/p>\n
The 2025 Sveriges Riksbank Prize for Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel has been awarded to three researchers who have shown how technological and scientific innovation, coupled to market competition, drive economic growth.<\/p>\n
One half of the prize goes to economic-historian Joel Mokyr of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and the other half is split between the economic theorists Philippe Aghion of the Coll\u00e8ge de France and the London School of Economics and Peter Howitt of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can\u2019t find the words to express what I feel,\u201d Aghion said. He says he will use the money for research in his laboratory at the Coll\u00e8ge de France.<\/p>\n
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The award \u201cunderlies the importance in investing in science for innovation and long-term economic growth,\u201d says economist Diane Coyle of the University of Cambridge. \u201cIt’s great to see the Nobel prize recognize the importance of this topic,\u201d adds innovation policy researcher Richard Jones of the University of Manchester, UK. \u201cIt’s important that economists understand the conditions that lead to technological progress,\u201d he adds. The winners, says Coyle, \u201chave long been on people\u2019s list of potential candidates.\u201d<\/p>\n
Economic growth at a rate of about 1-2 per cent annually is the norm for industrialized nations today. But such growth rates did not happen in earlier times, despite technological innovations, such as the windmill and the printing press.<\/p>\n
Mokyr showed that the key difference between now and then was what he calls \u201cuseful knowledge,\u201d or innovations based on scientific understanding. One example is the advances made during the Industrial Revolution, beginning in the eighteenth century, when improvements in steam engines could be made systematic rather than by trial and error.<\/p>\n
Aghion and Howitt, for their part, clarified the market mechanisms behind sustained growth in recent times. In 1992 they presented a model showing how competition between companies selling new products allows innovations to enter the marketplace and displaces older products: a process they called creative destruction.<\/p>\n
Underlying growth, in other words, is a steady churn of businesses and products. The researchers showed how companies invest in research and development (R&D) to improve their chances of finding a new product, and predicted the optimal level of such investment.<\/p>\n
According to economist Ufuk Akcigit of the University of Chicago, Aghion and Howitt highlight an important aspect of economic growth, which is that spending on R&D does not by itself guarantee higher rates of growth: \u201cUnless we replace inefficient firms from the economy, we cannot make space for newcomers with new ideas and better technologies.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen a new entrepreneur emerges, they have every incentive to come up with a radical new technology,\u201d Akcigit says. \u201cAs soon as they become an incumbent, their incentive vanishes\u201d and they no longer invest in R&D to drive innovation.<\/p>\n
Thus, because companies cannot expect to remain at the forefront of innovation indefinitely, the incentive for investing in R&D coming from market forces alone declines as a company\u2019s market share grows. To guarantee the societal benefits of constant innovation, the model suggests that it is in society\u2019s interests for the state to subsidize R&D, so long as the return is not merely incremental improvements.<\/p>\n
The work of all three laureates also acknowledges the complex social consequences of growth. In the early days of the Industrial Revolution there were concerns about how mechanisation would cause unemployment of manual workers \u2013 a worry echoed today with the increasing use of AI in place of human labour. But Mokyr showed that in fact early mechanization led to the creation of new jobs.<\/p>\n
Creative destruction, meanwhile, leads to companies failing and jobs being lost. Aghion and Howitt emphasized that society needs safety nets and constructive negotiation of conflicts to navigate such problems.<\/p>\n
Their model \u201crecognizes the messiness and complexity of how innovation happens in real economies,\u201d says Coyle. \u201cThe idea that a country\u2019s productivity level increases by companies going bust and new ones coming in is a difficult sell, but the evidence that that\u2019s part of the mechanism is pretty strong.\u201d<\/p>\n
This year\u2019s award comes at a time when funding for scientific research is under threat in the United States and around the world. \u201cIt\u2019s a very timely message when we\u2019re seeing the United States undermining so much of its science base,\u201d says Coyle. Aghion said, \u201cI don\u2019t welcome the protectionist wave in the US\u201d and added that \u201copenness is a driver of growth. I see dark clouds accumulating.\u201d to translate high-tech innovations into market value.<\/p>\n
Economic historian Kerstin Enflo, a member of the Nobel prize awarding committee, denied that the award was intended as a comment on the direction of US policies. \u201cIt is only about celebrating the work [the laureates] have done,\u201d she said at the press conference.<\/p>\n
More recently, researchers are questioning the \u2018growth-at-all-costs\u2019 narrative not least because of the ways to pursue growth has led to environmental degradation, including global warming.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow can we make sure we innovate greener?\u201d Aghion asked. \u201cFirms don\u2019t spontaneously do this. So how can we redirect growth towards green?\u201d Mokyr\u2019s work showed that growth can sometimes be self-correcting in the sense of producing innovations needed to solve such problems. But that is not a given and requires well-crafted policies to nurture innovation without promoting inequality and unsustainability. \u201cWe need to harness the productivity potential and minimize the negative effects,\u201d said Aghion.<\/p>\n
This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on October 13, 2025.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
October 14, 2025 4 min read Economics Nobel Honors Work Linking Scientific Research to Prosperity Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt share the Nobel economics prize for work that underlines the importance of investing in research and development By Philip Ball & Nature magazine Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt, winners of the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":28038,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[3823,844,3841,13708,1169,3141,516,722],"class_list":{"0":"post-28037","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-awarded","9":"tag-economics","10":"tag-growth","11":"tag-nobel","12":"tag-prize","13":"tag-research","14":"tag-science","15":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28037","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28037"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28037\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/28038"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}