French economist Jean Tirole won the 2014 economics Nobel Prize for his analysis of market power and regulation, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said on Monday. “Jean Tirole is one of the most influential economists of our time,” the award-giving body said. “Most of all he has clarified how to understand and regulate industries with a few powerful firms.” The economist will receive an 8 million Swedish crown ($1.1 million) prize. The economics prize, officially called the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in M...

The 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded on Thursday to French author Patrick Modiano for "the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation." Modiano, 69, is the author of more than two dozen books and several screenplays. The 11th Literature laureate born in France, Modiano is also the recipient of the Grand prix du roman de l'Académie française, the Prix Goncourt, the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature. Pri...

Today sees the launch of the OECD Development Co-operation Report 2014: Mobilising Resources for Sustainable Development. In today’s post, Erik Solheim, Chair of the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) argues that hundreds of billions more could potentially be mobilized for poverty alleviation and sustainable development over and above the $134 billion in development assistance donated last year. The enormous development progress seen over the past 20 years has been unprecedented in human history. Extreme poverty has been halved and 600 ...

The 2014 Nobel Prize for physics has been awarded to a trio of scientists in Japan and the US for the invention of blue light emitting diodes (LEDs). Professors Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura made the first blue LEDs in the early 1990s. By combining blue light with existing red and green LEDs, this enabled a new generation of bright, energy-efficient white lamps as well as LED screens. The winners will share prize money of eight million kronor (£0.7m). They were named at a press conference in Sw...

TECHNOLOGICAL revolutions are best appreciated from a distance. The great inventions of the 19^th century, from electric power to the internal-combustion engine, transformed the human condition. Yet for workers who lived through the upheaval, the experience of industrialisation was harsh: full of hard toil in crowded, disease-ridden cities. The modern digital revolution—with its hallmarks of computer power, connectivity and data ubiquity—has brought iPhones and the internet, not crowded tenements and cholera. But, as our special report explains, it is disrupting and dividing the world of work on a scale not seen for more than a century. Vast wealth is being created without many workers; and for all but an elite few, work no longer guarantees a rising income.