Produce and spread ideas.
Researchers, economists, essayists, popularizers, and public voices who advance our collective understanding of growth and innovation.
Paris Economic Forum · Prize
The PEF Prize, an award for individuals who work for growth and innovation.
Manifesto.
Europe and the world are entering a decade in which prosperity is less self-evident and more scarce, and in which growth is as much the product of will as of ideas.
Growth is the condition of social progress. A healthcare system, schools, pensions, maintained infrastructure, the financing of the energy transition, a standard of living that rises from one generation to the next: none of this holds without an economy that creates more wealth than it consumes. When growth stops, a society does not redistribute better. It has to choose among needs it can no longer all fund, and those choices fall first on the most vulnerable.
Over the long term, growth comes from innovation. An economy can produce more by working more or investing more, but that effect wears out. The only lasting source of gains remains the ability to do better with the same means — through new techniques, new ideas, new ways of organizing work and spreading knowledge. Gains in life expectancy, the reduction of hardship, and access for the many to goods once reserved for the few have come first from that.
None of this is automatic. Productivity is slowing in most advanced economies. Demographics are tightening and increasing the burden on those in work. Regulatory complexity, geopolitical fragmentation, and the difficulty of financing the long term add further frictions. The cost of inaction will be paid in living standards over the next twenty years.
Growth and innovation cannot be decreed. They depend on what societies understand of their own mechanisms, and on what their leaders decide from that understanding. They are therefore at stake in ideas, and in the decisions that put those ideas to the test.
The Paris Economic Forum, a forum for debate on the economy of tomorrow, recognizes those who, through thought and through decision, make growth possible.
The founding principle.
The PEF Prize honors individuals who work for growth and innovation through their publications, interventions, speeches, and public action. Two paths lead to that contribution.
Turn them into economic policy.
Government leaders, public officials, and heads of institutions who convert analysis into decision.
The prize recognizes work that is as rigorous as it is accessible to all decision-makers and actors in today's and tomorrow's economy — through publications, public statements, decisions, and their effects.
The three prizes.
Each year, the PEF Prize distinguishes three individuals.
Economics Prize
The economist · Researchers · Essayists · Public voicesIt honors economic thought that has mattered within the discipline and beyond it. Work that has advanced our understanding of growth, productivity, and innovation, and a capacity to carry that work beyond the circle of peers — through books, op-eds, teaching, hearings, and public speaking — so as to inform decisions and raise the level of public debate.
Public Action Prize
The public decision-maker · Governments · InstitutionsIt honors a public official whose economic policies have served growth and innovation. The jury assesses the decisions taken and their effects, rather than stated intentions.
Young Economist Prize
The next generationIt honors an early-career economist whose first work stands out for its originality, rigor, and reach, and who is willing to defend it in public debate. The prize supports the generation that will write the economic thought of tomorrow.
