World Bank Group President Ajay Banga has announced that Nobel laureate Michael Kremer has been appointed as World Bank Group Chief Economist and Senior Vice President for Development Economics.
“I am pleased to welcome Michael to the World Bank Group. He joins us at a time when the world needs bold solutions to its most urgent development challenges, including creating jobs that meet the aspirations of more than 1.2 billion young people reaching working age in the coming decade,” said Ajay Banga, President of the World Bank Group.
Michael Kremer on his part said “The World Bank Group has tremendous research capacity to develop and test innovative solutions to development problems—and the operational reach to scale them up and improve people’s lives.
“The challenges ahead are enormous, including creating jobs at scale, unlocking the private capital needed to fund development, and ensuring people have the health, education, and other services they need to thrive. At the same time, new technologies create huge opportunities to boost growth and human well-being. Data, evidence, and research can help firms and governments navigate both the challenges and opportunities. I am excited to work with staff across the Bank Group and partners around the world on this.” He noted.
Michael Kremer Profile
Michael Robert Kremer is an American development economist whose research has fundamentally influenced how economists, governments and international development organisations evaluate programmes designed to reduce poverty.
He is a 2019 recipient of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, which he shared with MIT economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. The three were recognised “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.”
Kremer is a University Professor in Economics and the College and the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, and directs the Development Innovation Lab. His research focuses on development economics, field experiments, education, healthcare, water and agriculture in developing countries.
Education
Kremer’s earned his undergraduate degree in Social Studies from Harvard University in 1985 and his PhD in Economics from the university in 1992.
His interest in development economics was shaped partly by early experiences in developing countries. As an undergraduate, he conducted research in Sri Lanka and India. He later taught secondary school in Kenya, an experience that became particularly important to his subsequent research career.
Kenyan Experiments
His work in Kenya in the 1990s helped establish the experimental approach that eventually became one of the defining features of modern development economics.
One of Kremer’s most important contributions began after he returned to Kenya in 1994. Friends working with an education-focused NGO wanted to determine whether their programmes were actually improving educational outcomes.
Kremer proposed using random assignment to evaluate the programmes, effectively applying an approach similar to a medical clinical trial to questions in economics.
Rather than simply comparing people who received a programme with those who did not, researchers could randomly assign participants to different groups. This made it easier to determine whether a particular intervention itself caused a measurable change.
The approach became known as the randomised controlled trial, or RCT, in development economics. Kremer’s work helped demonstrate how field experiments could provide evidence about whether specific anti-poverty interventions actually worked.
Contributions to Development Economics
Kremer’s central contribution has been to make development economics more experimentally oriented. Instead of treating poverty as one enormous problem, his research approach breaks it into specific questions.
For example: Does providing textbooks improve learning? Does deworming increase school attendance? Do particular agricultural technologies improve farmers’ productivity? Does a health intervention change behaviour?
Researchers can then test these interventions under controlled conditions and measure their effects.
The Nobel committee described this broader approach as a way of breaking down large problems into smaller, more manageable questions and using targeted experiments to determine which interventions are effective.
This methodology has subsequently become an important part of development economics and has influenced governments, NGOs and international development organisations.
Education has been one of the major areas of Kremer’s research. His studies in Kenya examined interventions designed to improve children’s educational outcomes. His work also contributed to research on school-based deworming programmes.
Kremer became a co-founder of Deworm the World, an initiative promoting school-based deworming in developing countries. Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute notes that he served as president of its board.
The research surrounding deworming became influential because it examined not only immediate health outcomes but also potential effects on school attendance and longer-term economic outcomes.
Vaccines and the Advance Market Commitment
Kremer has also worked on mechanisms for encouraging private-sector investment in vaccines for diseases that disproportionately affect poorer countries.
He helped develop the Advance Market Commitment (AMC), a financing mechanism intended to create incentives for pharmaceutical companies to develop and produce vaccines for diseases prevalent in developing countries.
In 2007, the governments of Britain, Canada, Italy, Norway and Russia, together with the Gates Foundation, pledged $1.5 billion to establish an AMC for a pneumococcal vaccine.
Other Roles Held
In 2010, Kremer became scientific director of Development Innovation Ventures at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), an initiative designed to identify, test and scale development innovations.
His work has also involved collaboration with governments, NGOs, teachers, farmers and other practitioners. Kremer has argued that development research is most useful when economists combine rigorous empirical research with knowledge from people directly involved in implementing programmes.
Nobel Prize Win
In October 2019, Kremer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences alongside Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo.
The Nobel citation recognised their “experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.” Their work represented a major shift in development economics toward field experimentation and evidence-based evaluation.
The Nobel recognition was particularly significant because the approach pioneered by the three economists sought to answer practical questions: not merely why poverty exists, but which interventions can measurably improve people’s lives. Kremer, Banerjee and Duflo later announced that they would donate their Nobel Prize money to the Weiss Fund for Research in Development Economics. The fund was established to support development economics research, including work by researchers and students in regions where research funding has historically been limited.
Harvard reported that research associated with the laureates had influenced programmes affecting millions of people, including education and preventive healthcare interventions.
Other Awards
Beyond the Nobel Prize, Kremer has received several major academic honours.
He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1997 and was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has also received a Presidential Faculty Fellowship and was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.
