Essays

The Nobel Prize winning economist Professor Amartya Sen has focused international attention on the significance of fundamental human freedoms and human rights for development theory and practice. In the past, dominant approaches have often characterized development in terms of GDP per capita; food security in terms of food availability; and poverty in terms of income deprivation. Emphasis was placed on economic efficiency and no explicit role was given to fundamental freedom, individual agency and human rights.

In contrast, Amartya Sen's research has highlighted the central idea   that, in the final analysis, market outcomes and government actions should be judged in terms of valuable human ends. His work has contributed to important paradigm shifts in economics and development. His approach is different from those that focus exclusively on income, growth and utility, with an increased emphasis on individual entitlements, capabilities, freedoms and rights. It has increased awareness of the importance of respect for human rights for socio-economic outcomes.  He has challenged the proposition that growth should take priority over Civil and political rights, while highlighting the role of human rights in promoting economic security, and the limitations of development without human rights guarantees.

In the past, human rights issues have typically been analyzed from the perspectives of separate academic disciplines. Philosophers have focused on foundational issues in ethics, and lawyers on questions of international legal obligation. Both disciplinary perspectives have tended 10 inflect the institutional, economic and structural processes that impact on individual freedoms and human rights. Meanwhile, in traditional economics, welfarist frameworks have dominated the landscape, and economists have often failed to incorporate the ideas of freedom and   rights into their theoretical and empirical work. Sen's research agenda challenged this past thinking and provides a basis for moving forward.

Sen has elaborated a far-reaching critique of utility as an   informational base for ethical and social judgment, as well as for the    ability economics to address real world phenomena such as poverty and Famine, and for its explanatory and predictive power. This has challenged the equation of "rational behaviour" with "sell interested Utility maximization”, as a predictor of individual behaviour. The use  Of ‘choice information an indicator of individual preference and value has highlighted the limitations of utility information as a basis for  evaluating and  comparing human interests, and of utility-based  interpretations of economic efficiency as reflected in standard approaches  to the fundamental  Theorems of Welfare Economics.

Sen has elaborated a series of formal proposals for moving the econoink-s agenda forward—beyond welfarism—and for expanding the types of variables and influences that are accommodated in theoretical and empirical economics. His contributions include far-reaching proposals for incorporating individual entitlements, functioning’s, opportunities, capabilities, freedoms and rights into the conceptual foundations and technical apparatus of economics and social choice. His proposals reflect a number of central recurring themes including the importance of pluralist informational frameworks, the need to go beyond the assessment of utility and income, and the importance of approaches giving a central role to freedoms and rights. In Sen's view, welfarist informational bases are too narrow to reflect the intrinsic value of freedom and rights, which should be brought directly into social- economic evaluation.

Sen's economic theory focuses on human capabilities and opportunities, with an explicit role for freedom, agency and rights, the food entitlements of individuals and groups, deprivation in human capabilities such as knowledge, longevity and living standards such as access to water and services. His theory lays more emphasis on self- reporting, self-esteem, participation and empowerment, and the expansion of valuable capabilities and the realization of freedoms and human rights.

The "entitlement approach" -provides a framework for analyzing the relationship between rights, interpersonal obligations and individual entitlement to things. A person's entitlement set is a way of characterizing his or her overall command over things, taking note of all relevant rights and obligations. A person's entitlements are the totality 3f things he can have by virtue of his rights. Sen has hypothesized that most cases of starvation and famines across the world arise not from people being deprived of things to which they are entitled, but from people not being entitled, in the prevailing legal system of institutional rights, to adequate means for survival. His empirical work suggests that in many famines in which millions of people have died, there was no overall decline in food availability, and starvation occurred as a consequence of shifts in entitlements resulting from exercising rights that  his legitimate in legal terms.

His theory establishes that a range of variables other than agricultural Productivity and aggregate food supply can undermine a person’s Entitlement to food, and that there is a possibility of an asymmetry in The incidence of starvation deaths among different population groups, With entitlement failures arising not only because of overall food Shortages, but because people are unable to trade their labour power or Skills. These findings challenge approaches to general equilibrium Analysis that rule out the possibility of starvation death due to inability

To acquire sufficient food through production or exchange. This has resulted in a shift in the focus of international attention away from Statistics   describing per capita calories and food supplies, and towards Statistics describing the differential ability of individuals, groups and Classes to   command food in practice.