Trio wins economics Nobel

The Nobel prize in economics was awarded on Monday to American-Israeli Joel Mokyr, France's Philippe Aghion and Canada's Peter Howitt for work on how technology drives and affects growth.

Mokyr, 79, won one half of the prize "for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress", the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

Aghion, 69, and Howitt, 79, shared the other half "for the theory of sustained growth through creative destruction", it added.

John Hassler, chair of the prize committee, told reporters their work answered questions about how technological innovation drives growth and how sustained growth can be maintained.

"During almost all of humankind's history, living standards did not change noticeably from generation to generation. Economic growth was, on average, zero, and stagnation was the norm," Hassler said. But over the last two centuries "things have been very different."

Not on the list

"During the last 200 years, the world has seen more economic growth than ever before in human history," Kerstin Enflo, a member of the economics prize committee, explained to reporters. AFP