US-based economists Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson were awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics on Monday for their work on wealth inequality between nations.

The scientists helped show why societies with “poor rule of law and institutions that exploit the population” do not produce growth or change for the better, the Nobel Committee said, demonstrating the “importance of societal institutions to a country's prosperity.”

Acemoglu and Johnson are professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, while Robinson is director of the University of Chicago's Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts, specializing in the economies of sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.

Acemoglu and Robinson wrote the popular 2012 book “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty,” which examines the roots of inequality and explains why some countries are successful in gaining wealth and influence.

The Nobel Committee noted in its statement that the richest 20% of countries are now about 30 times richer than the poorest 20%, with the former increasing their wealth while the latter fails to close the gap.

The laureates have helped explain how the political and economic systems that colonizing countries operated from the 16th Committee said.

They have developed “new empirical and theoretical approaches that have significantly improved our understanding of global inequality,” said Jakob Svensson, director and professor of economics at the Institute for International Economic Studies at Stockholm University, during a press conference.

The question of why the gap between rich and poor nations is so persistent is not new, but remains “one of the most pressing in the social sciences,” he added.

The winners of the prize, officially called the “Swedish Riksbank Prize for Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel,” will receive 11 million Swedish kronor ($1.058 million) from the Swedish central bank.

The prize money will be divided equally among the winners – as in 2022, when the reward was split between US-based economists Ben Bernanke, Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig for their research on banks and financial crises.

Economist and historian Claudia Goldin won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics for improving understanding of women's earnings and labor market outcomes.

The 2024 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded last week to the Japanese atomic bomb survivor organization Nihon Hidankyo, in recognition of its efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

The other Nobel Prizes, which were first awarded in 1901, are in the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine and literature.

The prize in economics was established in 1968 to mark the 300th anniversary of the Swedish central bank and was awarded for the first time a year later. The winner is selected by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in recognition of work of “outstanding importance”.