The 2024 Nobel Prize for Economics has been awarded to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson, three US -based professors for their studies into why some countries succeed and others fail.

The winners were announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences at a news conference in Stockholm, marking the end of the 2024 Nobel season after prizes for medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and peace were awarded last week.

The economics award is worth 11 million Swedish kronor (roughly $1 million) – the same as the other Nobel categories. it is technically known as the Sveriges Riksbank prize in economic sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel.

The explanation put forward by the winners suggests that inclusive institutions set up for the long-term benefit of European migrants ended up resulting in more prosperous societies in the long term.

However, they found that in countries where the aim was to exploit the Indigenous population and extract resources for the colonisers’ benefit, the impact has been detrimental, and resulted in far poorer societies, leaving some countries trapped in low economic growth cycles.

“The laureates demonstrated that this led to a reversal of fortune. The places that were, relatively speaking, the richest at their time of colonisation are now among the poorest.”

However, the academics said the effect can be reversed if a country can “break free of its inherited institutions to establish democracy and the rule of law. In the long run, these changes also lead to reduced poverty.”

Acemoğlu, 57, and Johnson, 61, are both professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the US. Together, they co-authored a book last year, called Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity.