An economics award with a different founder
Alfred Nobel’s will set out five prizes, and economics was not among them. The economics award began much later, in 1968, when Sweden’s central bank, Sveriges Riksbank, established a prize in his memory. It is formally called the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel—not one of the awards specified in the will.
That distinction is more than wording. The bank supplied the money for the new award, while Nobel’s original prizes had a different source: Nobel’s estate. The economics prize therefore rests on a separate institutional arrangement, even though its name and ceremonies connect it to the Nobel awards.
How it became part of the Nobel ceremony
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences selects the economics laureates, the same academy that awards the Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry. The economics award follows a Nobel-like selection process and is presented alongside the Nobel prizes, making it easy to mistake it for one of the original five.
The arrangement gives economics a prominent place in the Nobel tradition without changing what Nobel’s will said. The bank created and funds the prize; the academy chooses its recipients. Its Nobel connection is real, but it comes through later sponsorship and shared institutions—not through Nobel’s testament.
That difference matters whenever someone describes an economist as a “Nobel laureate”: the shorthand is familiar, but the award’s formal name preserves the history of who actually established it.
