Hello and welcome to Business Daily here on the BBC World Service. I'm Ed Butler, and it is three weeks now since the Nobel Committee, the world's most prestigious prize-giving body, announced this year's economics laureates, giving the award to three economists, Abidgett Banergy, Michael Kramer, and last but by no means least, Esther Duflo.

The three had produced a body of work examining specifically and practically how people in poor communities respond and adapt to various financial incentives.

The committee said the trio had dramatically improved our ability to fight poverty in practice. Well, Professor

Duflo of MIT is, in fact, only the second woman ever to win the economics prize. She's also at

46, the youngest person, male or female, to do so. She came into the Business Daily studio yesterday

to tell me about all of that pioneering work that she's

been doing and her latest book co-authored with her husband, Abhijit Banerjee, on the economics

of poverty. We were quite flabbergasted, flawed. No word gets through to people in your position

on those circumstances.

No words get to, no.

I mean, the prize, I guess, was for your collective work on that book, Poor Economics,

which of course was an FTA book of the year in 2011.

A detailed assessment of how people in the poor world respond to economic challenges and incentives

and how that differs from established economic modeling.

Would that be a right way to describe that book?

Yes, I guess the established way to do economic modeling and to some extent to do policymaking as well

is to try and take the whole question of poverty, like all at once.

How are we going to solve poverty in the world?

And of course, that's a question that doesn't really have a simple answer.

Instead, it's much more productive to break it into thousands of more manageable questions,

which is, for example, how are we making sure that kids learn something when they're in school?

Or how can we make sure that people who have a business idea can finance it?

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