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Ostrom 1st female Nobel Economics prize winner(15/10/2009)

Ostrom, 76, and Williamson, 77, shared the 10 million kronor ($1.4million)economics prize for work that "advanced economic governance research from the fringe to the forefront of scientific attention," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

Ostrom, a political scientist at Indiana University, showed how common resources - forests, fisheries, oil fields or grazing lands - can be managed successfully by the people who use them, rather than by governments or private companies.

Ostrom said it's an honour to be the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in economics - and promised that she won't be the last. She said people discouraged her from seeking a Ph.D. when she applied for graduate school but she loved studying economics.

Williamson, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, focused on how firms and markets differ in the ways that they resolve conflicts. He found that companies are typically better able to resolve conflicts than markets when competition is limited, the citation said.

"There has been a huge discussion how the big banks, the big investment banks have acted badly, with bosses who have misused their power, misused their shareholders' confidence, and that is in line with (Williamson's) theories," prize committee member Per Krusell said.

Ostrom, also the founding director of Arizona State University's Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity, devoted her career to studying the interaction of people and natural resources. One notable publication she wrote in 1990 examined both successful and unsuccessful ways of governing natural resources - forests, fisheries, oil fields, grazing lands and irrigation systems - that are used by individuals.

Ostrom's work challenged conventional wisdom, showing that common resources can be successfully managed without privatization or government regulation.

To explain her ideas, the academy cited an example about dams in Nepal that Ostrom used in her 1990 book "Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action."

Local people had for many years successfully managed irrigation systems to allocate water between users, but then the government decided to build modern dams made of concrete and steel with the help of foreign donors.
"Despite flawless engineering, many of these projects have ended in failure," the academy said.

That was because the new, modern dams cut out communications and ties between the users. The new dams required little maintenance whereas the earthen local dams forced users to work together to keep them functional.

Ostrom told the academy by telephone that she was surprised by their choice. Ostrom doesn't know exactly how she will spend her share of the $1.4 million in award money, but she said she will invest it in her students and "wonderful" colleagues.

The choice of Obama, meanwhile, was the biggest surprise of this year's awards.

In other awards, American scientists Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Carol W. Greider and Jack W. Szostak shared the Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering a key mechanism in the genetic operations of cells, an insight that has inspired new lines of research into cancer.

The physics prize was split between Charles K. Kao, who helped develop fiberoptic cable, and Americans Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith who invented the "eye" in digital cameras.

Americans Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitz and Ada Yonath of Israel shared the chemistry prize for their atom-by-atom description of ribosomes.

Romanian-born German writer Herta Mueller won the literature prize for her critical depiction of life behind the Iron Curtain.

(AP)