'Poor Economics' wins the 2011 FT Business Book of the Year award

“Poor Economics” by MIT professors Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo has won the prestigious Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award for 2011.

The authors are part of a group of economists known as “randomistas”, and have used controlled trials across five continents to test the impact of policies aimed at beating poverty, from the provision of free anti-malaria bed-nets to education subsidies. “Poor Economics” maps out a third way between those who believe aid does more harm than good and those such as Jeffrey Sachs who believe the reverse.

The book beat off stiff competition to take home the £30,000 prize. See below for details of the other short-listed books which are also available to borrow from the library:

• Exorbitant Privilege: Barry Eichengreen
  Raises the  question of whether the US dollar’s dominance is threatened by the rise of new economic blocs or the weakness of the domestic economy.
• Triumph of the City: Edward Glaeser
  Looks at how cities think, why they behave in the manners that they do and what wisdom they share with the people who inhabit them.
• Wilful Blindness: Margaret Heffernan
  An investigation into why people turn a blind eye to obvious warning signals.
• Good Strategy/ Bad Strategy: Richard Rumelt
  Clears out the mumbo jumbo and muddled thinking and provides a clear way to create and implement a powerful action-oriented strategy for the real world.
• The Quest: Daniel Yergin
  The follow-up to The Prize (Yergin’s 1992 Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the history of the oil industry) takes the energy story forward into the 21st century.

MBS Library has followed this award closely since it’s establishment in 2005, as it aims to identify books that provide compelling and enjoyable insight into modern business issues, including management, finance and economics.

This year we have again purchased every book which appeared on the long list published earlier this year. You can Search for books from this list using the Library catalogue

Long list for FT Business Book of the Year 2011

You may also be interested in the previous winners of the award listed below:

• 2010: “Fault Lines” – Raghuram Rajan
• 2009: “Lords of Finance– Liaquat Ahamed
• 2008: “When Markets Collide” – Mohamed El-Erian
• 2007: “The Last Tycoons” – William Cohan
• 2006: “China Shakes the World” – James Kynge
• 2005: “The World is Flat” – Thomas Friedman

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