Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences 2025 awarded to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, Peter Howitt

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on Monday awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt "for having explained innovation-driven economic growth."

One half of the prize will go to Mokyr “for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress,” while the other half will be shared between Aghion and Howitt “for the theory of sustained growth through creative destruction.”

The economics prize is formally known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

This year’s laureates have shown how that growth is powered by technological innovation and the continuous replacement of old ideas and methods with new ones.

“Technology advances rapidly and affects us all, with new products and production methods replacing old ones in a never-ending cycle,” the Academy said in its citation. “This is the basis for sustained economic growth, which results in a better standard of living, health and quality of life for people around the globe.”

Mokyr, an economic historian, used historical evidence to uncover why technological progress became self-sustaining after the industrial revolution. He demonstrated that for innovations to continuously build upon one another, societies need both practical know-how and scientific understanding as well as openness to new ideas and change.

Aghion and Howitt, meanwhile, developed the influential 1992 model of “creative destruction,” which formalised the process by which new technologies and firms replace outdated ones.

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

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was established in 1968 by Sweden’s central bank and is the only Nobel prize not included in Alfred Nobel’s original will.