History adds up to first for Nobel pair

TWO American economic historians, Robert Fogel and Douglass North, were yesterday awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize for Economics for applying quantitative methods to economic history to explain long-term economic development and decline.

The Swedish Academy of Sciences said the two economists, who will share the dollars 845,000 prize, were the first economic historians to win. They had carried out pioneering work in the field of 'new economic history', which uses modern mathematical methods to analyse economic history.

The 67-year-old Mr Fogel, who heads the centre for Population Economics at the University of Chicago, has stirred controversy with his work on slavery, which he concludes was economically efficient and collapsed for political rather than economic reasons.

He also attempted to debunk the hypothesis that the railways were a key factor in the economic ascent of the US by demonstrating that economic development was the sum of a multitude of changes rather than a few significant innovations. Mr Fogel is the fourth successive economist associated with the University of Chicago to win the Nobel prize.

Professor North, 72, of Washington University, St Louis, has argued that institutional change as well as population growth and advances in technology determine the long-term economic development of Europe and the US. He has advised the Czech government on privatisation of the state-owned economy, and also advised on economic reforms in Russia, Argentina and Peru.

The academy said: 'North maintains that new institutions arise when groups in society see a possibility of availing themselves of profits that are impossible to realise under prevailing institutional conditions.'