American economist Paul Krugman has won the 2008 Nobel prize for economics for bringing together analysis of trade patterns and where economic activity takes place, the prize committee announced today.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the prestigious 10 million crown ($1.4 million) prize recognised Krugman's formulation of a new theory to answer questions driving world-wide urbanisation.
"He has thereby integrated the previously disparate research fields of international trade and economic geography," the committee said in its statement.
Mr Krugman is a professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton Univesity in the United States.
The economics prize, officially called the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, was established in the 1960s and is not part of the original group of awards set out in Alfred Nobel's 1895 will.
Reuters