The 2019 Nobel Prize for Economics was given to a woman for the second time, name the first woman who was earlier awarded this prize.

Question

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Correct — D, Elinor Ostrom (the paper prints the name as 'Elinar'). She won the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 2009, shared with Oliver E. Williamson, and was cited 'for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons'. She was the first woman to win the economics prize. The 'second time' in the question refers to Esther Duflo, who shared the 2019 prize with Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty; at 46 she was also the youngest economics laureate.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Duflo is the 2019 laureate the question is talking about — the second woman, not the first. Placing her at option (a) is the deliberate trap for anyone who reads only the headline of the news item.  (b) Gerty Cori won a Nobel in 1947, but in Physiology or Medicine — she was the first woman to win in that discipline, not in Economics.  (c) Maria Goeppert Mayer shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics for the nuclear shell model. Again a woman laureate, but in a different discipline.

Concept: The economics prize is not one of Alfred Nobel's original five awards. It is the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, instituted by Sweden's central bank in 1968 and first awarded in 1969, though it is presented alongside the others. Elinor Ostrom, trained as a political scientist, won it in 2009 for showing that Garrett Hardin's 'tragedy of the commons' is not inevitable: communities of users — of forests, fisheries, pastures and irrigation systems — repeatedly build their own rules, monitoring and sanctions that keep a shared resource sustainable without either privatisation or state control.

State PCS 2019 Q4 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2019 Q4 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer