On Oct. 13, 2025, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded Philippe Aghion (London School of Economics), Peter Howitt (Brown University) and Joel Mokyr (Northwestern University) the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for their contributions explaining “innovation-driven economic growth” and identifying the “prerequisites of sustained growth through technological progress.” As we did last year, RM has reviewed and catalogued what some of this year’s key Nobel Prize winners have said on Russia, Ukraine and issues pertinent to U.S.-Russian relations more broadly.

Aghion and Howitt, experts on endogenous growth (how growth emerges from internal factors in an economy) and technological innovation, shared half of the prize for their work, which quantified the process of “creative destruction”— the process in which new and better products enter the market, compelling rivals to adapt or become obsolete. Aghion has previously written on an “obsession with creative destruction” in imperial Russia, which sought to prevent an organized, mobile working class by prohibiting technological advances in cotton mills and metal foundries. Aghion and Howitt have also recently voiced their concerns regarding “dark clouds ahead” as geopolitical tensions impact trade and the U.S. takes a “protectionist” stance, both of which have the potential to stifle innovation. 

Mokyr, an economist and historian, received the other half of the prize for his historical analyses which identified the causes of sustained economic growth following the industrial revolution. He has noted that the U.S. and Russia have been nuclear-armed adversaries for a long time without a nuclear attack occurring; however, the future of a nuclear-armed world remains unknown and full of risk, according to Mokyr, who compared it to a “person who falls from the 95^th floor and at the 8^th floor he says, ‘So far, everything is okay.’”

Each of these laureates have further commented on subjects relevant to the national interests of both the U.S. and Russia. Aghion’s research has highlighted the difficulties faced by foreign investors in Russian and CIS markets and the challenges of economic transition in the former Soviet Union. He exhorts contemporary Europeans not to overlook the economic windfalls brought by technological breakthroughs and to find innovative solutions to streamline industrial policy in critical sectors, such as defense. While Howitt’s commentary is more limited, his theories and observations on AI have meaningful implications for regional and global markets. Meanwhile, Mokyr’s historical perspective offers insights on Russia’s complex relations with the United States and Europe. His works explain how autocratic governance hinders the institutionalization of scientifically useful knowledge and long-term economic growth. 

The compilation below catalogues statements made by this year’s Nobel prize winners in Economics. The compilation is part of Russia Matters’ “Competing Views” rubric, where we share prominent figures’ takes on issues pertaining to Russia, U.S.-Russian relations and broader U.S. policies affecting Russia. All sections may be updated with new or past statements. The quotes below are divided into categories similar to those in Russia Matters’ news and analysis digests; reflecting the most pertinent topic areas for U.S.-Russian relations broadly, and for drivers of the two countries’ policies toward one another. Entries are arranged in chronological order.

I. U.S. and Russian priorities for the bilateral agenda

Nuclear security and safety:

• No significant developments.

North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs:

• No significant developments.

Iran and its nuclear program:

Joel Mokyr:

• “I know people in Israel have been talking for years about what will happen with Iran's nuclear program, but Iran is just one example... If Iran has nuclear weapons (and, in the long run, I think it's inevitable, no matter how much Bibi and others object), Saudi Arabia will also have them, and from there, it will spread further. It's just a matter of time before terrorist organizations get a hold of them." (CTech, 07.01.24)

Humanitarian impact of the Ukraine conflict:

• No significant developments.

Military and security aspects of the Ukraine conflict and their impacts:

• No significant developments.

Military aid to Ukraine: 

• No significant developments.

Punitive measures related to Russia’s war against Ukraine and their impact globally:

• No significant developments.

Ukraine-related negotiations: 

Joel Mokyr

• Mokyr signed an open letter to Columbia University’s Jeffrey Sachs, which pushed back on Sachs’ positions on the war: “There is no justification for the Russian war of aggression. A clear moral compass, respect for international law and a firm understanding of Ukraine’s history should be the defining principles for any discussions toward a just peace.” (Vox Ukraine, 03.20.23)
• “[Trump] failed completely in Ukraine. In the Middle East, they’ve stopped shooting, and that’s wonderful, but I don’t know if it will last long in Gaza or in Judea and Samaria.” (CTech, 10.16.25) 

Great Power rivalry/new Cold War/NATO-Russia relations:

Phillipe Aghion

• “I think European countries have to realize that we should no longer let (the) U.S. and China become technological leaders and lose to them.” (France24, 10.13.25)
• “I am not welcoming the protectionist way in the U.S. That is not good for…world growth and innovation” (Arab News, 10.13.25)

Peter Howitt

• “It’s pretty clear that these [tariffs] are going to discourage innovation by reducing what we call the scale effect… Starting a tariff war just reduces the size of the market for everybody.” (Reuters, 10.13.25)
• Howitt warned of "dark clouds ahead" as trade disruptions continue. He said the biggest problem Canada faces is political and it's important to maintain open economic trade. When markets get restricted, the cost of international trade gets more expensive—which eventually blunts the incentive to innovate, Howitt said. (The Canadian Press, 10.13.25)

Joel Mokyr

• Mokyr noted the effect of Great Power rivalry on technological change: “Nations that worry about their political standing in the world are more likely to be subject to the ‘Sputnik effect,’ the discovery that a society has fallen behind in technological terms and is consequently threatened. From Peter the Great’s Russia to Meiji Japan to the United States after the launching of the first Soviet satellite, nations have embarked on efforts to advance the techniques they employed primarily for political reasons.” (“The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress,” 1990)
• “The rest of the world has not evolved as I expected and hoped 25 years ago, after the end of the Cold War. At that time, there was great hope that the world would move much closer toward a liberal and democratic model. Francis Fukuyama wrote about the end of history.” (NZZ, 07.17.24)

China-Russia: Allied or aligned?

• No significant developments.

Missile defense:

• No significant developments.

Nuclear arms:

Joel Mokyr

• Mokyr emphasized that economic tailwinds have overpowered geopolitical headwinds before, arguing against predictions that stagnation was the new normal: “The Cold War was an incredible amount of waste of resources on nuclear arms. On and on and on. And so, you know, plenty of headwinds and yet this has been the most successful century in terms of economic history that ever happened.” (Econ Talk, 11.25.13)
• “The United States and Russia have been facing each other with nuclear weapons for over 75 years, and since Nagasaki there hasn’t been a nuclear attack. But it’s like the person who falls from the 95^th floor and at the 8^th floor he says, ‘So far, everything is okay.’” (CTech, 07.01.24)

Counterterrorism:

• No significant developments.

Conflict in Syria:

• No significant developments.

Cyber security/AI: 

Philippe Aghion

• Aghion expressed concern with stifled technological dynamism in Europe and its implications for national security: “In Europe, in the name of competition policy we became very anti any form of industrial policy. I think we need to evolve on that and find ways to reconcile industrial policy in areas like defense, climate, AI, biotech.” (Reuters, 10.13.25)

Peter Howitt

• Howitt highlighted the potential and dangers of AI for labor markets: “Every new technology that has a great impact creates great losses as well. People have to be compensated, people have to be negotiated with in order to resolve that conflict in a way that allows the technologies to proceed.”(NPR, 10.13.25)
• On AI: “We don’t know what the creative destruction effects are going to be… It’s obviously a fantastic technology that has amazing possibilities. And it also obviously has amazing potential for destroying other jobs or replacing highly skilled labor. And all I can say is that this is a conflict. It’s going to have to be regulated.” (AFP/Yahoo News, 10.13.25)

Joel Mokyr

• On AI and labor: “Machines won’t replace us. They move us to more interesting, more challenging work… Technological change not only replaces people, it creates new tasks.” (AFP/Yahoo News, 10.13.25)

Energy exports from CIS Countries:

• No significant developments.

Climate change:

Philippe Aghion

• Aghion and his coauthors noted theoretical and regulatory obstacles with implications for U.S.-Russian relations: “A common concern is that even though climate change is a global problem, each nation would have an incentive to freeride on the green policies of other countries… An obvious solution to this is international coordination and cooperation… But this has proven to be difficult and a number of countries have instead turned to unilateral policies with local carbon markers, such as EU-ETS in the case of the European Union, and the IRA for the United States.” (Peterson Institute for International Economics, December 2023)

U.S.-Russian economic ties:

• No significant developments.

U.S.-Russian relations in general:

• No significant developments.

II. Russia’s domestic policies 

Domestic politics, economy and energy:

Philippe Aghion

• On patterns of privatization in Russia and other post-Communist states: “In most other countries, privatization has in effect privileged insiders. This is true of Russia, where despite the description of privatization as voucher privatization, insiders are majority owners in most firms. This is true in most of the CIS countries, and in the countries which were previously parts of Yugoslavia.” (Economics of Transition,  May 1998)
• On challenges faced by foreign investors restructuring Russian firms: “The evidence from Russia… suggests that the benefits of control are large: bribing managers to leave, or to accept restructuring and the risk of losing their job has proven surprisingly costly. This may come from the ability of managers to extract substantially more than their product from the firm, from their ability to appropriate large rents under insider ownership.” (Economics of Transition, May 1998)
• “In their book Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson refer to other examples where incumbent public officials blocked growth out of fear that the ensuing creative destruction would jeopardize their power. … Another example is Russia, where the obsession with creative destruction led to a prohibition on new cotton mills and metal foundries in order to prevent the emergence of an organized and concentrated working class and to curb the development of railroads, which could foster a threatening mobility of the population.” (“The Power of Creative Destruction: Economic Upheaval and the Wealth of Nations,” co-authored with Céline Antonin, Simon Bunel and Jodie Cohen-Tanugi, 2021)
• “Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, migration of Russian inventors was unrelated to tax considerations because inventors were prohibited from emigrating. By contrast, after the collapse, there is a strong negative correlation between the highest marginal tax rate in a country and the percentage of Russian inventors who emigrate to that country: Russian scientists choose to emigrate primarily to countries with lower tax rates.” (“The Power of Creative Destruction: Economic Upheaval and the Wealth of Nations,” co-authored with Céline Antonin, Simon Bunel and Jodie Cohen-Tanugi, 2021)
• “The last century witnessed a large-scale experiment with an alternative system—a system of central planning in the Soviet Union and other communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. This system failed to offer individuals the freedom and economic incentives necessary for frontier innovation, and so these nations were unable to get beyond an intermediate level of development.” (“The Power of Creative Destruction: Economic Upheaval and the Wealth of Nations,” co-authored with Céline Antonin, Simon Bunel and Jodie Cohen-Tanugi, 2021)

Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt

• “In this celebrated essay the author [Alexander Gerschenkron] argues that relatively backward economies, such as Germany, France, and Russia during the 19th century, adopted particular policies and arrangements that were growth enhancing given their early stage of development but could cease to be so at a later stage of development.” (“The Economics of Growth,” 2009)
• “It is also argued that the prospect of becoming members of the European Union has prompted structural reforms in Central Europe, and that the prospect of becoming a member of the World Trade Organization may foster democracy in China or Russia.” (“The Economics of Growth,” 2009)
• “[T]here is an idea, neither precisely formalized by the existing literature nor extensively confronted with data, that economic growth requires the development of an educated middle class that eventually pushes for the transition to democracy. We saw this process at work in South Korea, South Africa, Latin America, and the Soviet bloc.” (“The Economics of Growth,” 2009)

Joel Mokyr 

• Mokyr highlighted tensions between Russia’s historic form of governance and the conditions required for innovation-driven growth: “It seems that as a general rule then, the weaker the government, the better it is for innovation. With some notable exceptions, autocratic rulers have tended to be hostile or indifferent to technological change…Only when strong governments realized that technological backwardness itself constituted a threat to the regime, as in the cases of Peter the Great’s Russia, post-1867 Japan, and to a lesser extent, Napoleon’s France, did they decide to intervene directly to encourage technological change.  (“The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress,” 1990)
• “The enlightenment touched lightly (and with substantial delay) upon Iberia, Russia and South America, but in many of these areas it encountered powerful resistance and retreated.” (The Intellectual Origins of Modern Economic Growth, June 2005)
• “The synergy created by the interaction between the growth of useful knowledge… and the formal and informal institutions that emerged side-by-side suggests a strong complementarity. With just technological progress but no institutional change, the process would have hit barriers that would have aborted the take-off, as in nineteenth century Russia.” (The Institutional Origins of the Industrial Revolution, October 2007)
• “Technology today is the result of a multinational effort in which boundaries mean less and less… Of course, if a country has really terrible institutions, such as Putin’s Russia or Khamenei’s Iran, they are not only not likely to generate new technology, but may even find it hard to absorb it.” (Montpellier: Communications and Strategies, 2015)
• Mokyr noted historic Russian reforms following military defeat: “There is validity to the argument that interstate competition in Europe at times did mitigate and soften the worst forms of mis-governance in Europe and led to institutional progress… Reforms were often introduced after a major military defeat (such as the Prussian defeat by Napoleon in 1806 or the Russian debacle in the Crimean War), or in an attempt to improve the economy so as to expand the tax base.” (“A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy,” 2016)
• “The historical evidence that coercion works at the level of values, based on the experience of political revolutions from the French to the Russian to the Iranian, is rather mixed. But clearly government-controlled entities, such as schools and the military, can reproduce certain elements of socialization including a belief in punctuality and discipline, temperance, and the virtuousness of obedience, hard work, and technology.” (“A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy,” 2016)
• On the enlightenment’s effect in Russia: “The enlightenment rang in the beginning of the end of the extractive state in Europe. Government still taxed, but even in absolutist empires such as Russia and Prussia, the purpose of the discussion became less and less to enrich the rulers and their cronies, and more and more the provision of supposedly welfare-enhancing goods and services that the private sector for one reason or another could not provide.” (Journal of Institutional Economics, March 2017)
• On technological development in the USSR: “Yes, you had a champion, Yuri Gagarin, outstanding achievements of Russian scientists, but do not forget: you also had Trofim Lysenko and other charlatans that climbed the political stair and controlled science. And this is an illustration of what happens with a lack of competition in the market of ideas.” (The Moscow Times, 10.13.25)

Defense and aerospace:

Philippe Aghion

• Aghion noted resistance to restructuring within Russian military conglomerates in the 1990s: “The Impulse Research and Development Enterprise in Russia is an example in point. Primarily a military conglomerate in 1991, the share of military production in total output dropped from 80 to 20 between December 1991 and January 1992... There is clear evidence of collusion between central management and workers collectives to resist restructuring.” (European Economic Review, June 1994)
• “Another example is the Saratov Aviation Plant in Russia, which employs 13,000 workers and produces military aviation products, commercial aircraft as well as a range of non-aviation consumer products… Some enterprises which produced both aviation components (or services) and consumer goods did initially spin-off from the conglomerate. These have subsequently been forced to rejoin the conglomerate. (European Economic Review, June 1994) 

Joel Mokyr 

• On unbalanced technological development in the USSR: “Some areas necessary for the state developed – aerospace, military technology, and in them Russia could compete with the West for a long time. But many other areas were on the sidelines because they were not interesting to the state.” (The Moscow Times, 10.13.25)

Security, law-enforcement, justice and emergencies:

• No significant developments.

III. Russia’s relations with other countries

Russia’s external policies, including relations with “far abroad” countries:

Joel Mokyr

• “While obviously suspicious of Western values and anxious to protect its Slavic culture, there were episodes in its history in which Russia made deliberate efforts to westernize. Much like in other non-Western societies, the transfer [of new ideas and technologies] was partial and spasmodic.” (“A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy,” 2016)
• “I have always been amazed in Russia with this duality, the constant tension between those who consider Russia part of the European project and those who say: ‘No, we have our own civilization, we must resist the infection of Western influence.’” (The Moscow Times, 10.13.25)

Ukraine:

Joel Mokyr

• On the history of Industry in Eastern Ukraine: “Most striking was the career of a Welsh engineer, John Hughes (1814–89), who ended up in eastern Ukraine in 1870, bringing along about a hundred Welsh ironworkers to start one of the most successful industrial enterprises of Imperial Russia in a town that was eventually named after him (Yuzhovka, today Donetsk).” (Keynes Lecture in Economics, 09.25.19)

Russia's other post-Soviet neighbors:

Philippe Aghion 

• On shock therapy reforms in Central and Eastern Europe: “A complete reliance on privatization and the operation of market forces may be an untenable restructuring strategy. Indeed, state enterprises are largely obsolete…in terms of their trade structure which relied heavily on the Command Comecon system, in terms of their domestic markets which also relied on planned inter-firm trade flows, and also with regard to technological processes, management and accounting systems. Time is thus needed to turn these enterprises around to make at lease some of them both viable and saleable.” (European Economic Review, April 1993)