British-born economist Angus Deaton has won the 2015 economics Nobel Prize for his work on consumption, poverty and welfare that has helped governments to improve policy through tools such as household surveys and tax changes. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the microeconomist’s work had been a major influence on policy making, helping for example to determine how different social groups are affected by specific changes in taxation.

“To design economic policy that promotes welfare and reduces poverty, we must first understand individual consumption choices,” the award-giving body said in announcing the 8 million Swedish crown ($978,000) prize.

In his first public comments after winning the Nobel prize, Deaton said that, while extreme poverty has fallen sharply in the last 20 to 30 years and that he expected this trend to continue, he did not want to sound like a “blind optimist”.

In one key work, “The Great Escape; Health, Wealth and the Origins of Inequality”, Deaton describes the huge increase in global prosperity in the past two centuries, underpinned by medical and technological advances, but also looks in depth at the inequalities to which that progress has given rise.

The economics prize, officially called the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, was established in 1968. It was not part of the original group of awards set out in dynamite tycoon Nobel’s 1895 will.