Americans have dominated the annual Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences three years running, and it may not surprise Nobel watchers if the trend continues.

Even the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which decides the winner, has said the United States is a driving force, in part because of the money spent for research.

While the nominees aren't publicly revealed, some names bandied about have included economist Christopher Sims and Jagdish Bhagwati of Columbia University.

Still others contend that the Academy, which votes in secret and keeps the list of nominees secret for five decades, may look to Europe or Asia for this year's winner.

Past awards have recognized research on topics ranging from poverty and famine to how multinational corporations reap profits, and theories on how people choose jobs and the welfare losses caused by environmental catastrophes.

The prize is worth 10 million krona (US$1.3 million).

Two Americans won the prize last year for pioneering the use of psychological and experimental economics in decision-making to make markets safer.

Daniel Kahneman, 68, a US and Israeli citizen based at Princeton University in New Jersey and Vernon L. Smith, 75, of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, received the prizes.

It was the third year in a row that Americans have taken the prize.

In 2001, three Americans won the economics prize for advances in ways to analyze markets that can be applied to both developing and advanced economies.

Of the 51 people who have received the prize since it was first awarded in 1969, 34 have been from the United States.

Wednesday's announcement of the economics prize is the second Nobel of the day. The chemistry award will be announced in the morning.

The announcements of this year's Nobel awards started last week with the literature prize going to J.M. Coetzee of South Africa.

On Monday, American Paul C. Lauterbur, and Briton Sir Peter Mansfield were selected for the 2003 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for discoveries leading to a technique that reveals images of the body's inner organs.

The physics prize on Tuesday went to Alexei A. Abrikosov, Anthony J. Leggett, and Vitaly L. Ginzburg, for their work concerning two phenomena called superconductivity and superfluidity.

The Nobel Peace Prize was to be announced Friday in Oslo, Norway.

The medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and peace prizes were first awarded in 1901, after they were established in the will of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish industrialist and inventor of dynamite.

The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was established separately in 1968 by the Swedish central bank, but it is grouped with the other awards.

The prizes are presented to the winners on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896.

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