The 2017 China Economics Prize was co-awarded to Chinese veteran economists Zou Zhizhuang and Chen Xiaohong on Saturday in Beijing.
Zou Zhizhuang, also known as Gregory Chow, was born in South China's Guangdong Province in 1929 and earned a doctorate in Economics at the University of Chicago after graduating from Lingnan University in Guangzhou.
Zou proposed the famous "Chow test" in the field of econometrics and is also one of the pioneers among the first generation of well-known overseas Chinese scholars who conducted research on China's economic problems.
Moreover, Zou has also made remarkable contributions to the training of modern Chinese economists since China's reform and opening-up in the 1970s.
At the award ceremony, Zou shared his insights as an economist. In his point of view, many hypotheses in economics can be applied to different countries, for instance, the finding of Friedman's study on the effects of increasing money supply on output and prices.
He pointed out adopting a market economy is not conducive for achieving rapid economic growth, but said it is necessary.
Born in 1965 in Central China's Hubei Province, Chen graduated from Wuhan University with a bachelor's degree and later completed her PhD at the University of California, San Diego. Now, she is a professor at Yale University.
Her most significant breakthrough contributions are her works on sieve estimation and inference on semi-nonparametric conditional moment restrictions containing unknown functions of endogenous variables, according to her introduction on Yale University's website.
The China Economics Prize is founded and presented by the National Economics Foundation to award Chinese economists for their contribution to the development of economic research. The foundation endorses one award each year amounting to 2 million yuan ($301,172) as well as a gold medal.
This year is the second time the prize has been awarded.
Also during the award ceremony, 10 PhD graduates from universities including Peking University, Tsinghua University and Nankai University won the Award for the National Excellent Doctoral Dissertation.
