Princeton University professor and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has been awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in economics.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences credited him with "having shown the effects of economies of scale on trade patterns and on the location of economic activity", adding: "His ideas have given rise to an extensive reorientation of the research on these issues."

While the prize was given to him for research and writing done over the past three decades, Mr Krugman is more widely known for the column he has written for the past eight years on the New York Times editorial pages.

In those columns he has been extremely critical of the Bush administration's fiscal policies. This week, he posed the question whether Prime Minister Gordon Brown "saved the world" with his bail-out plan.

The answer is premature, he wrote, but "what we do know, however, is that Mr Brown and Alistair Darling... have defined the character of the worldwide rescue effort, with other wealthy nations playing catch-up."

Some 170 Jewish academics, writers and statesmen have been awarded the Nobel Prize since its inception in 1901, over 20 per cent of the total number of recipients.