Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, Peter Howitt win Nobel Prize in Economics

The 2025 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences has been awarded to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt for their work on "innovation-driven economic growth", the Nobel Committee said on Monday.

Mokyr of Northwestern University received one half of the prize for identifying the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress, while the other half was jointly conferred to Aghion of Collège de France, and Howitt of Brown University, for developing the theory of sustained growth through creative destruction, it added.

"Over the last two centuries, for the first time in history, the world has seen sustained economic growth. This has lifted vast numbers of people out of poverty and laid the foundation of our prosperity. This year’s laureates in economic sciences... explain how innovation provides the impetus for further progress," said The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which is responsible for selecting Nobel laureates in physics, chemistry and economic sciences.

Economic historian Mokyr, the committee said, "used historical sources as one means to uncover the causes of sustained growth becoming the new normal". He stressed that in order for innovations to succeed one another in a self-generating process, it is not enough to know that something works, but scientific explanations for why it works are also essential.

Before the industrial revolution, such explanations were often missing, making it difficult to build on new discoveries and inventions, the committee said.