US economist Edmund S. Phelps won the 2006 Nobel Economics Prize Monday for work on trade-offs in macroeconomic policy, the Nobel jury said, noting that his work had improved understanding of how policy affected welfare for present and future generations.

His work has "deepened our understanding of the relation between short-run and long-run effects of economic policy" and has had "a decisive impact on economic research as well as policy", the jury said.

Phelps, 73, is a professor of political economy at Columbia University in New York.

His research has shown that although full employment, stable prices and rapid growth are central goals of economic policy, trade-offs sometimes need to be made between the consumption of current and future generations.

"He has emphasized that not only the issue of savings and capital formation but also the balance between inflation and unemployment are fundamentally issues about the distribution of welfare over time," the Nobel committee said.

Phelps will take home the prize sum of US$1.37 million.

The Nobel Economics Prize, the fourth of the six coveted prizes to be awarded this year, is the only one not originally included in the last will and testament of the creator of the awards, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel.

It was created by the Swedish Central Bank in commemoration of its tricentenary in 1968, and was first awarded in 1969. It is also funded by the bank.

The prizes for Medicine, Physics and Chemistry were awarded last week. The Literature Prize will be announced on Thursday and the Peace Prize on Friday.

The Medicine Prize went to US research duo Andrew Fire and Craig Mello for their discovery of how to silence malfunctioning genes, a breakthrough which could lead to an era of new therapies to reverse crippling disease.

The Physics Prize went to US space scientists John Mather and George Smoot on Tuesday for a pioneering space mission which supports the "Big Bang" theory about the origins of the universe.

(China Daily October 10, 2006)