New Delhi, April 12 -- Nobel Laureate Abhijit Banerjee said it's time for Europe to step up and "lead the world" as US President Donald Trump slashed nearly all the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) contracts. Banerjee said Trump is right in saying that Europe has "surrendered its leadership in the world."

In an interview with NDTV World on Saturday, Banerjee talked about a recent article in The Financial Times, in which he, along with fellow Nobel laureate and wife Esther Duflo, argued that the world doesn't need the US to be the sole source of aid funding.

They wrote in the article, "The rest of the world should take the lead, demonstrating its ability to raise and effectively spend aid money."

During the lat...