Trio win economics Nobel for insights into post-colonial wealth inequalities

Three US-based professors, including two UK-born academics, have been awarded this year's Nobel prize in economics, for showing how political and economic systems introduced by colonisers can determine whether a country is rich or poor today.

- Kalyeena Makortoff, Larry Elliott

The explanation put forward by Turkish-American Daron Acemoglu, Sheffield-born Simon Johnson and Briton James A Robinson 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,” the Nobel prize announcement said.