Mokyr, Aghion and Howitt win 2025 Nobel economics prize

"The laureates have taught us that sustained growth cannot be taken for granted” says the prize awarding body

A screen displays an image of the Nobel Prize medal, ahead of the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, in Stockholm, Sweden Oct 13, 2025. REUTERS/Tom Little

Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt won the 2025 Nobel economics prize for "having explained innovation-driven economic growth", the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said on Monday.

The prestigious award, formally known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, is the final prize to be given out this year and is worth 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.2 million).

"The laureates have taught us that sustained growth cannot be taken for granted. Economic stagnation, not growth, has been the norm for most of human history. Their work shows that we must be aware of, and counteract, threats to continued growth," the prize-awarding body said in a statement.

The awards for medicine, physics, chemistry, peace and literature were announced last week.

Those prizes were established in the will of Swedish dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel and have been handed out since 1901, with a few interruptions mostly due to the world wars.

The economics prize was established much later, being given out first in 1969 when it was won by Norway's Ragnar Frisch and Jan Tinbergen from the Netherlands for work in dynamic economic modelling. Tinbergen's brother Nikolaas also won a prize, taking home Medicine in 1973.

While few economists are household names, relatively well-known winners include former US Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, and Paul Krugman and Milton Friedman.

Last year's economics award went to US-based academics Simon Johnson, James Robinson and Daron Acemoglu for research that explored the relationship between colonisation and the establishment of public institutions to explain why some countries have been mired in poverty for decades.

($1 = 9.5112 Swedish crowns)