Three economists jointly won a Nobel Prize in late 2025 for their groundbreaking quantitative work analyzing how, and why, economies grow. Their math is complicated — but their conclusion is simple: to foster economic expansion, policymakers need to promote technological innovation and stoke competition between rival firms.
The surest way to foster that innovation and competition is to strengthen intellectual property rights. As two of the winners showed in a pivotal study, “product market competition and patent protection can complement each other in inducing innovation.”
