Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt win 2025 Nobel Prize in economics

By | October 13, 2025

A collage of the three laurates. PHOTO/Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

The 2025 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences has been awarded to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt for their groundbreaking work explaining how innovation fuels long-term economic growth.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the trio as this year’s laureates, recognizing their collective contribution to understanding how creativity, technology, and competition drive global prosperity.

Mokyr, a professor at Northwestern University and Tel Aviv University, was honored for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress.

His research has traced how societies transitioned from centuries of stagnation to continuous growth by embracing scientific understanding and openness to new ideas.

“If innovations are to succeed one another in a self-generating process, we not only need to know that something works, but also why it works,” Mokyr argued in his studies — a principle the Academy said helped explain the rise of modern industrial economies.

Aghion, of Collège de France, INSEAD, and the London School of Economics, and Howitt, of Brown University, jointly received the other half of the prize for the theory of sustained growth through creative destruction.

Their influential 1992 model of creative destruction demonstrated how new technologies replace outdated ones,a process that simultaneously fuels progress and disrupts existing industries.

“The innovation represents something new and is thus creative. However, it is also destructive, as the company whose technology becomes passé is outcompeted,” the Academy noted in its citation.

In recognizing the economists, the Academy emphasized that their work shows how technological change, when supported by open and competitive markets, underpins sustained prosperity.

“The laureates’ work shows that economic growth cannot be taken for granted,” said John Hassler, Chair of the Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences. “We must uphold the mechanisms that underlie creative destruction, so that we do not fall back into stagnation.”

The prize, worth 11 million Swedish kronor, will be shared equally among the winners. Their insights, the Academy said, continue to shape how policymakers and researchers understand the delicate balance between innovation, competition, and inclusive growth in an ever-evolving global economy.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, founded in 1739, is an independent organization whose overall objective is to promote the sciences and strengthen their influence in society. The Academy takes special responsibility for the natural sciences and mathematics, but endeavours to promote the exchange of ideas between various disciplines. 

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