This is the VOA Special English Economics Report.

Two American professors will share the twenty eleven Nobel Prize in economics. Staffan Normark, Permanent Secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, announced the winners this week.

STAFFAN NORMARK: "The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel, 2011, to Professor Thomas J. Sargent at New York University, New York, USA and Professor Christopher A. Sims at Princeton University, Princeton, USA."

Professors Sims and Sargent are both sixty-eight years old. They are being honored for work they did in the nineteen seventies and eighties. But their research has been and remains important to economic policy in many countries. This is especially true in a time when debt in Europe and other problems around the world have hurt economic growth.

The Nobel committee recognized the two professors for their work in showing how policy decisions can affect the health of economies. Both men have studied how actions, like raising interest rates or cutting taxes, affect things like economic growth and inflation.