Why not Nobel prize for China for poverty alleviation asks Chinese netizens

Beijing, Oct 16: This year's Nobel Economics Prize to Indian-origin economist Abhijit Banerjee, his wife Esther Duflo from MIT and Harvard professor Michael Kremer "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty" has sparked off a debate in China that it deserves the coveted prize for lifting over 850 million people from extreme poverty.

The announcement of the winners of the Nobel prize in economics has set Chinese internet abuzz, with some Chinese netizens posting their support for China to receive the Nobel Economics Prize for lifting more than 850 million people out of extreme poverty and contributing to 70 per cent of worldwide poverty reduction, official media here reported.

The #NobelEconomicsPrize was viewed more than 25 million times on China's Twitter-like Sina Weibo platform akin to Twitter, state-run Global Times reported on Wednesday. Some users posted that the US trio's experiment in tackling poverty could not compare with China's efforts. "China is best qualified to speak on poverty alleviation. The Chinese government and researchers have done more than just experiments," one post said.

Announcing the award for the trio, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the "research conducted by this year's Laureates has considerably improved our ability to fight global poverty. In just two decades, their new experiment-based approach has transformed development economics, which is now a flourishing field of research." They have introduced a new approach to obtaining reliable answers about the best ways to fight global poverty, it said. Their "research findings - and those of the researchers following in their footsteps - have dramatically improved our ability to fight poverty in practice," it said.

Xu Hongcai, an economist with the China Centre for International Economic Exchanges, told the Global Times that "China's biggest achievements on poverty alleviation are in practice, while the Nobel Prize is designated to give to academics. They are two different things." Xu noted that winning the Nobel Prize is not the criteria for judging a country's contribution and achievements in tackling poverty.

Commentator Sima Nan posted on his Weibo that China's proposal, practice, research and achievements in poverty alleviation were one of the most brilliant successes in world history. Chinese people should be proud of China's poverty alleviation progress and continue the work with or without a Nobel Prize, he posted.