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Krugman has taken the Bush administration to task over the current financial meltdown, blaming its pursuit of deregulation and unencumbered fiscal policies for the financial crisis that has threatened the global economy with recession.

He has come out forcefully against John McCain during the economic meltdown, saying the Republican candidate is “more frightening now than he was a few weeks ago” and earlier that the GOP has become “the party of stupid.”

The 55-year-old Princeton University professor has worked intensely on the impact of free trade and globalisation, as well as the driving forces behind urbanisation, the Nobel citation said.

The financial turmoil that has sent shares crashing has cast a shadow over this year’s prize and after his triumph, Krugman said he was “extremely terrified” by the crisis, Sweden’s TT news agency reported.

“I’m happier about it now than I was five days ago. I was extremely happy with the European summit yesterday, so I’m feeling better today, but it’s still terrifying,” he added.

“I never thought I would see anything that looked like 1931 in my lifetime, but in many ways this crisis does,” he added.

A number of experts had predicted the crisis would prompt the Nobel committee to shift its focus away from liberal market theories now under increased attack because of the credit crunch.

And by naming a critic of unfettered free market policies, the jury has decided to confront major, civilisation-changing issues.

In columns for the New York Times, Krugman has been a harsh critic of the Bush administration’s policies.

He strongly opposed the initial wording of US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s 700-billion-dollar bank bailout plan – which he described as “financial Russian roulette” – although he conceded that a rescue was needed.

On Sunday, he wrote admiringly of Britain’s rescue scheme, buying stakes in troubled banks and extending huge guarantees, asking whether “Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, (had) saved the world financial system.”

“The Brown government has shown itself willing to think clearly about the financial crisis, and act quickly on its conclusions. And this combination of clarity and decisiveness hasn’t been matched by any other Western government, least of all our own,” he wrote.

While he has few kind words for the administration, which he has charged with engaging “in a game of deception” on Iraq and the economy, Krugman is even more sceptical of the Republican candidate in the current US election campaign John McCain.

In a recent column he stated that Democrat rival Barack Obama was “wrong to suggest that a McCain-Palin administration would just be a continuation of Bush-Cheney. If the way John McCain and Sarah Palin are campaigning is any indication, it would be much, much worse.”

The Nobel committee hailed Krugman’s economic approach “based on the premise that many goods and services can be produced more cheaply in long series, a concept generally known as economies of scale.”

The theory shows that globalisation tends to increase pressure on urban living because specialisation sucks people into centres of concentration in which “regions become divided into a high-technology urbanised core and a less developed ‘periphery’,” the Nobel jury said.

Traditional trade theory assumes that differences between countries explain why some nations export agricultural products while others export industrial goods. Such a process holds out the prospect that some countries can improve their situations through complementarity.

But Krugman’s “theory clarifies why worldwide trade is in fact dominated by countries which not only have similar conditions, but also trade in similar products,” the Nobel jury wrote.

His theory helps to explain that globalisation tends towards concentration, both in terms of what a manufacturing base makes, and where it is located.

The Nobel committee has focused on an area of economic theory with deep implications for the understanding of how globalisation affects industries, populations, regions and the structure of trade, particularly in developing countries.

Krugman has written dozens of books and several hundred articles, primarily about international trade and global finance and was known as creating so-called “new economic geography.”

In 1991, he received the 1991 John Bates Clark Medal, an award given every two years by the American Economic Association to an economist under 40.

He will receive his Nobel gold medal and diploma along with 10 million Swedish kronor (1.42 million dollars, 1.02 million euros) at a formal prize ceremony in Stockholm on December 10.

Speaking to Swedish public television immediately after the announcement, Krugman said the award “obviously will seriously warp my next few days.”

India-born Venkatraman Ramakrishnan is a senior scientist at the MRC Laborartory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge.

Born in 1952 in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu, Ramakrishnan shares the Nobel prize with Thomas E Steitz (US) and Ada E Yonath (Israel) for their “studies of the structure and function of the ribosome”.

Ramakrishnan earned his B.Sc. in Physics (1971) from Baroda University and his Ph.D. in Physics (1976) from Ohio University.

He moved into biology at the University of California, San Diego, where he took a year of classes, then conducted research with Dr Mauricio Montal, a membrane biochemist.

“This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry awards Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A Steitz and Ada E Yonath for having showed what the ribosome looks like and how it functions at the atomic level,” the Nobel committee said in its citation.

All three have used a method called X-ray crystallography to map the position for each and every one of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome, it said.

“This year’s three Laureates have all generated 3D models that show how different antibiotics bind to the ribosome. These models are now used by scientists in order to develop new antibiotics, directly assisting the saving of lives and decreasing humanity’s suffering,” the citation said.

Better known as Venky among friends, Ramakrishnan started out as a theoretical physicist. After graduate school, he designed his own 2-year transition from physics to biology.

As a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University, he worked on a neutron-scattering map of the small ribosomal subunit of E Coli. He has been studying ribosome structure ever since.

Ramakrishnan has authored several important papers in academic journals.

In the August 26, 2000 issue of Nature, Ramakrishnan and his coworkers published the structure of the small ribosomal subunit of Thermus thermophilus, a heat-stable bacterium related to one found in the Yellowstone hot springs.

With this 5.5 Angstrom-resolution structure, Ramakrishnan’s group identified key portions of the RNA and, using previously determined structures, positioned seven of the subunit’s proteins.

In the September 21, 2000 issue of Nature, Ramakrishnan published two papers. In the first of these, he presents the 3 Angstrom structure of the 30S ribosomal subunit.

His second paper reveals the structures of the 30S subunit in complex with three antibiotics that target different regions of the subunit. In this paper, Ramakrishnan discusses the structural basis for the action of each of these drugs.

After his postdoctoral fellowship, Ramakrishnan joined the staff of Brookhaven National Laboratory in ther US. There, he began his collaboration with Stephen White to clone the genes for several ribosomal proteins and determine their three-dimensional structures.

He was also awarded a Guggenheim fellowship during his tenure there, and he used it to make the transition to X-ray crystallography.

Ramakrishnan moved to the University of Utah in 1995 to become a professor in the Department of Biochemistry. There, he initiated his studies on protein-RNA complexes and the entire 30S subunit.

He since moved to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, where he is a Senior Scientist and Group Leader in the Structural Studies Division. He joins the list of several Nobel laureates who worked at the laboratory.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said their work has been fundamental to the scientific understanding of life and has helped researchers develop antibiotic cures for various diseases.

Yonath is the fourth woman to win the Nobel chemistry prize and the first since 1964, when Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin of Britain received the prize.

This year’s three laureates all generated three-dimensional models that show how different antibiotics bind to ribosomes.

“These models are now used by scientists in order to develop new antibiotics, directly assisting the saving of lives and decreasing humanity’s suffering,” the academy said in its announcement.

“All three have used a method called X-ray crystallography to map the position for each and every one of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome,” the academy said.

Alfred Nobel, a Swedish industrialist who invented dynamite, established the Nobel Prizes in his will in 1895. The first awards were handed out six years later.

Each prize comes with a 10 million kronor ($1.4 million) purse, a diploma, a gold medal and an invitation to the prize ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10. The Peace Prize is handed out in Oslo.

On Monday, three American scientists shared the Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering a key mechanism in the genetic operations of cells, an insight that has inspired new lines of research into cancer.

The physics prize on Tuesday was split between a Hong Kong-based scientist who helped develop fiber-optic cable and two Canadian and American researchers who invented the “eye” in digital cameras _ technology that has revolutionized communications and science.