Stockholm: The Nobel Prize in economics will be announced on Monday with sentiment leaning toward proponents of free and global trade, including Indian-born Jagdish Bhagwati, as a likely winner.
Other topics, including why natural rates of unemployment are driven by economic necessity and even "Ricardian equivalence," which dictates that governments cannot increase demand by deficit spending are also theories that could be honoured with the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.
Like the traditional Nobel science prizes - medicine, physics and chemistry - there is no precise formula for predicting the decision by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Previous winners of the prize, given out since 1969, ranged from how the control of information affects markets to welfare economics used to explain the economic mechanisms that underly famine and poverty.
That wide swath of difference is unlikely to change this year, said Hubert Fromlet, the chief economist with Swedbank in the Swedish capital.
Perennial contender Bhagwati, a noted proponent of free trade and critic of opponents of globalisation, is listed by Thomson Scientific as a likely winner.
The Columbia University economics professor was an external adviser to the World Trade Organisation and served as a special policy adviser on globalisation to the United Nations.
Fromlet said this year's award has seen some 150 to 200 names and topics bandied about as likely winners.
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