Like many persons, my pronostic was that the 2007 Nobel price in Economics would go to Jagdish Bhagwati. My intuition was that this would have been a way of helping the Doha Round in the same way that the Al Gore Nobel prize is a way of helping Kyoto.
Following the very surprising 2007 prize to, once again, adepts of game theory, I decided to check how many international trade economists have received this price since 1969, the year the prize was created. I discovered that the only year where the prize was given to international trade economists was 1977 where the winners were Ohlin and Meade ( Mundell, the "father of the Euro", received it in 1999 but his is a specialist of international monetary issues and not of international trade).
In my view, this is not an accident. It is clear that the Economics Nobel Prize Committee is now controlled by Game Theorists who think that the mathematical "demonstration" of simple insights is a great achievement. For International trade policy, this is a sad thing since the Nobel prize signals to future researchers that the way of achieving recognition is to produce game theory theorems formalizing useful insights and not to solve the urgent problems of globalization and the temptation of protectionism. Sometimes, I wonder if it would be better to put an end to this prize which is doing more harm than good if the game theory trend continues.
