Development as Freedom

by Sen, Amartya

  2. These claims and their implications are more fully discussed in my “Poverty as Capability Deprivation,” mimeographed, Rome: Bank of Italy.

  3. For example, hunger and undernutrition are related both to food intake and to the ability to make nutritive use of that intake. The latter is deeply affected by general health conditions (for example, by the presence of parasitic diseases), and that in turn depends much on communal health care and public health provisions; on this see Drèze and Sen, Hunger and Public Action (1989), and S. R. Osmani, ed., Nutrition and Poverty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).

  4. See, for example, James Smith, “Healthy Bodies and Thick Wallets: The Dual Relationship between Health and Socioeconomic Status,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 13 (1999). There is also another type of “coupling” between (1) undernutrition generated by income-poverty and (2) income-poverty resulting from work deprivation due to undernutrition. On these connections, see Partha Dasgupta and Debraj Ray, “Inequality as a Determinant of Malnutrition and Unemployment: Theory,” Economic Journal 96 (1986); “Inequality as a Determinant of Malnutrition and Unemployment: Policy,” Economic Journal 97 (1987); and “Adapting to Undernourishment: Biological Evidence and Its Implications,” in The Political Economy of Hunger, edited by Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). See also Partha Dasgupta, An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), and Debraj Ray, Development Economics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).

  5. The large contribution of such handicaps to the prevalence of income poverty in Britain was sharply brought out by A. B. Atkinson’s pioneering empirical study, Poverty in Britain and the Reform of Social Security (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). In his later works, Atkinson has further pursued the connection between income handicap and deprivations of other kinds.

  6. On the nature of these functional handicaps, see Dorothy Wedderburn, The Aged in the Welfare State (London: Bell, 1961); Peter Townsend, Poverty in the United Kingdom: A Survey of Household Resources and Standards of Living (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979); J. Palmer, T. Smeeding and B. Torrey, The Vulnerable: America’s Young and Old in the Industrial World (Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute Press, 1988); among other contributions.

  7. I have tried to investigate the perspective of capability deprivation for analyzing gender inequality in Resources, Values and Development (1984; 1997); Commodities and Capabilities (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1985); and “Missing Women,” British Medical Journal 304 (March 1992). See also Pranab Bardhan, “On Life and Death Questions,” Economic and Political Weekly 9 (1974); Lincoln Chen, E. Huq and S. D’Souza, “Sex Bias in the Family Allocation of Food and Health Care in Rural Bangladesh,” Population and Development Review 7 (1981); Jocelyn Kynch and Amartya Sen, “Indian Women: Well-Being and Survival,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 7 (1983); Pranab Bardhan, Land, Labor, and Rural Poverty (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984); Drèze and Sen, Hunger and Public Action (1989); Barbara Harriss, “The Intrafamily Distribution of Hunger in South Asia,” in Drèze and Sen, The Political Economy of Hunger, volume 1 (1990); Ravi Kanbur and L. Haddad, “How Serious Is the Neglect of Intrahousehold Inequality?” Economic Journal 100 (1990); among other contributions.

  8. On this, see United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 1995 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

  9. See W. G. Runciman, Relative Deprivation and Social Justice: A Study of Attitudes to Social Inequality in Twentieth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1966); and Townsend, Poverty in the United Kingdom (1979).

  10. On this see my “Poor, Relatively Speaking,” Oxford Economic Papers 35 (1983), reprinted in Resources, Values and Development (1984).

  11. The connection is analyzed in my Inequality Reexamined (Oxford: Clarendon Press; and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), chapter 7.

  12. Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995).

  13. See the collection of papers in Isher Judge Ahluwalia and I.M.D. Little, eds., India’s Economic Reforms and Development: Essays for Manmohan Singh (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998). See also Vijay Joshi and Ian Little, Indian Economic Reforms, 1991–2001 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996).

  14. These arguments are more fully developed in Drèze and Sen, India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity (1995).

  15. See G. Datt, Poverty in India and Indian States: An Update (Washington, D.C.: International Food Policy Research Institute, 1997). See also World Bank, India: Achievements and Challenges in Reducing Poverty, report no. 16483 IN, May 27, 1997 (see particularly figure 2.3).

  16. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759; revised edition, 1790); republished, edited by D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976).

  17. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971). See also Stephen Darwall, ed., Equal Freedom: Selected Tanner Lectures on Human Values (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), with contributions by G. A. Cohen, Ronald Dworkin, John Rawls, T. M. Scanlon, Amartya Sen and Quentin Skinner.

  18. Thomas Scanlon, “Contractualism and Utilitarianism,” in Utilitarianism and Beyond, edited by Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). See also his What We Owe Each Other (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).

  19. See, for example, James Mirrlees, “An Exploration in the Theory of Optimal Income Taxation,” Review of Economic Studies 38 (1971); E. S. Phelps, ed., Economic Justice (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973); Nicholas Stern, “On the Specification of Modes of Optimum Income Taxation,” Journal of Public Economics 6 (1976); A. B. Atkinson and Joseph Stiglitz, Lectures on Public Economics (London: McGraw-Hill, 1980); D. A. Starrett, Foundations of Public Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); among many other contributions.

  20. A. B. Atkinson, “On the Measurement of Inequality,” Journal of Economic Theory 2 (1970), and Social Justice and Public Policy (Brighton: Wheatsheaf; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983). See also S. Ch. Kolm, “The Optimum Production of Social Justice,” in Public Economics, edited by J. Margolis and H. Guitton (London: Macmillan, 1969); Amartya Sen, On Economic Inequality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973; expanded edition, including an annex with James Foster, 1997); Charles Blackorby and David Donaldson, “A Theoretical Treatment of Indices of Absolute Inequality,” International Economic Review 21 (1980), and “Ethically Significant Ordinal Indexes of Relative Inequality,” Advances in Econometrics, volume 3, edited by R. Basmann and G. Rhodes (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1984).

  21. In my paper “Inequality, Unemployment and Contemporary Europe” (presented at the Lisbon conference on “Social Europe” of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, May 5–7, 1997, published in International Labour Review, 1997), I have discussed the relevance of this contrast for contemporary policy issues in Europe. The importance that the unemployed themselves attach to the loss of freedom and capability as a result of unemployment is illuminatingly analyzed (with Belgian data) by Eric Schokkaert and L. Van Ootegem, “Sen’s Concept of Living Standards Applied to the Belgian Unemployed,” Recherches Economiques de Louvain 56 (1990).

  22. See the literature cited in my “Inequality, Unemployment and Contemporary Europe” (1997). On the psychological and other “social harms” of unemployment, see Robert Solow, “Mass Unemployment as a Social Problem” in Choice, Welfare and Development, edited by K. Basu, P. Pattanaik and K. Suzumura (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), and A. Goldsmith, J. R. Veum and W. Darity Jr., “The Psychological Impact of Unemployment and Joblessness,” Journal of Socio-Economics 25 (1996), among other contributors. See also the related literature on “social exclusion”; good introductions to the literature can be found in Gerry Rodgers, Charles Gore and J. B. Figueiredo, eds., Social Exclusion: Rhetoric, Reality, Responses (Geneva: International Institute for Labour Studies, 1995); Charles Gore et
al., Social Exclusion and Anti-Poverty Policy (Geneva: International Institute for Labour Studies, 1997); Arjan de Haan and Simon Maxwell, Poverty and Social Exclusion in North and South, special number, Institute of Development Studies Bulletin 29 (January 1998).

  23. A. B. Atkinson, Lee Rainwater and Timothy Smeeding, Income Distribution in OECD Countries (Paris: OECD, 1996).

  24. The need for new policy initiatives is particularly strong at this time. See Jean-Paul Fitoussi and R. Rosanvallon, Le Nouvel âge des inégalités (Paris: Sevil, 1996); Edmund S. Phelps, Rewarding Work: How to Restore Participation and Self-Support to Free Enterprise (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). See also Paul Krugman, Technology, Trade and Factor Prices, NBER Working Paper no. 5355 (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1995); Stephen Nickell, “Unemployment and Labor Market Rigidities: Europe versus North America,” Journal of Economics Perspectives 11 (1997); Richard Layard, Tackling Unemployment (London: Macmillan, 1999); Jean-Paul Fitoussi, Francesco Giavezzi, Assar Lindbeck, Franco Modigliani, Beniamino Moro, Dennis J. Snower, Robert Solow and Klaus Zimmerman, “A Manifesto on Unemployment in the European Union,” mimeographed, 1998.

  25. Data from M. W. Owen, S. M. Teutsch, D. F. Williamson and J. S. Marks, “The Effects of Known Risk Factors on the Excess Mortality of Black Adults in the United States,” Journal of the American Medical Association 263, number 6 (February 9, 1990).

  26. On this see my Commodities and Capabilities (1985). UNDP’s Human Development Reports have provided important information and assessment regarding this way of seeing poverty, especially in Human Development Report 1997. See also Sudhir Anand and Amartya Sen, “Concepts of Human Development and Poverty: A Multidimensional Perspective” (1997).

  27. Drèze and Sen, India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity (1995); Amartya Sen, “Hunger in the Modern World,” Dr. Rajendra Prasad Memorial Lecture, New Delhi, June 1997; and “Entitlement Perspectives of Hunger,” World Food Programme, 1997.

  28. For sources of this information and of other information used in this section, see Drèze and Sen, India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity (1995), chapter 3 and statistical appendix. The picture here focuses on 1991, for reasons of data availability. There has, however, been a considerable increase in literacy just reported in the latest Indian National Sample Survey. There are also some important policy departures announced by some of the state governments, such as West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh.

  29. See C.J.L. Murray et al., U.S. Patterns of Mortality by County and Race: 1965–1994 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Center for Population and Developmental Studies, 1998), table 6d, p. 56.

  30. The severity of India’s failure to devote resources and efforts to social development is convincingly and movingly discussed by S. Guhan, “An Unfulfilled Vision,” IASSI Quarterly 12 (1993). See also the collection of essays in his honor: Barbara Harriss-White and S. Subramanian, eds., Illfare in India: Essays on India’s Social Sector in Honour of S. Guhan (Delhi: Sage, 1999).

  31. This is taken from table 3.1 in Drèze and Sen, India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity (1995). See also Saraswati Raju, Peter J. Atkins, Naresh Kumas and Janet G. Townsend, Atlas of Women and Men in India (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1999).

  32. See also A. K. Shiva Kumar, “UNDP’s Human Development Index: A Computation for Indian States,” Economic and Political Weekly, October 12, 1991, and Rajah J. Chelliah and R. Sudarshan, eds., Indian Poverty and Beyond: Human Development in India (New Delhi: Social Science Press, 1999).

  33. See World Bank, World Development Report 1994 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), table 1, p. 163.

  34. On this see the extensive comparison made by Peter Svedberg, Poverty and Undernutrition: Theory and Measurement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). Svedberg also scrutinizes alternative approaches to measuring undernutrition, and the conflicting pictures generated by different statistics, but arrives at a firm conclusion against India in terms of undernutrition vis-à-vis sub-Saharan Africa.

  35. See World Bank, World Development Report 1993 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), table A.3. Mortality rates have worsened with the spread of the AIDS epidemic.

  36. See Svedberg, Poverty and Undernutrition (1997). See also C. Gopalan, ed., Combating Undernutrition (New Delhi: Nutrition Foundation of India, 1995).

  37. See Nevin Scrimshaw, “The Lasting Damage of Early Malnutrition,” in R. W. Fogel et al., Ending the Inheritance of Hunger (Rome: World Food Programme, 1997). See also the papers of Robert W. Fogel, Cutberto Garza and Amartya Sen in the same volume.

  38. This is not to deny that each of the standard criteria of undernourishment admits some room for doubt, but indicators based on health and physique do have some advantages over measures that simply look at food input. It is also possible to make use of the available medical and functional knowledge to improve the criteria to be used. On these and related issues, see Dasgupta, An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution (1993); Osmani, ed., Nutrition and Poverty (1993); Scrimshaw, “The Lasting Damage of Early Malnutrition,” and Robert W. Fogel, “The Global Struggle to Escape from Chronic Malnutrition since 1700,” in Fogel et al., Ending the Inheritance of Hunger (1997).

  39. See Svedberg, Poverty and Undernutrition and the literature cited there. See also United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 1995 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

  40. Africa also suffers from a much greater burden of international debt, which is now gigantic. There is also the difference that African countries have been much more subjected to dictatorial governance, partly as a result of being caught in the cold war, with the West and Soviet Union both being willing to provide support to military coups and other takeovers by their nondemocratic allies. The penalties of dictatorship in terms of loss of voice by the vulnerable underdog and loss of transparency and accountability will be discussed in chapters 6 and 7. Even the inclination to run into heavy debt to meet military and other priorities is encouraged by dictatorial rules.

  41. The UNDP has produced since 1990 interesting and important detailed data on the nature of deprivation in the different parts of the world in its annual Human Development Reports, initiated by Dr. Mahbub ul Haq. They have also proposed and presented some aggregate measures, in particular the Human Development Index (HDI) and the Human Poverty Index (HPI). These aggregate indices have tended to draw much more public attention than the detailed and diverse empirical pictures emerging from the tables and other empirical presentations. Indeed, getting public attention has clearly been a part of UNDP’s objective, particularly in its attempt to combat the overconcentration on the simple measure of GNP per head, which often serves as the only indicator of which the public takes any notice. To compete with the GNP, there is a need for another—broader—measure with the same level of crudeness as the GNP. This need is partly met by the use of the HDI, just as the HPI has been offered by the UNDP as a rival to the standard measures of income poverty. It is not my intention to question the merits of such competitive use, in the context of getting public attention (I have, in fact, provided technical help to the UNDP to devise both these indices). The fact remains, nevertheless, that the Human Development Reports are much richer in relevant information than can be obtained from an exclusive concentration on the aggregative indicators such as HDI and HPI.

  42. Amartya Sen, “Missing Women” (1992).

  43. See also my Resources, Values and Development (1984); Barbara Harriss and E. Watson, “The Sex Ratio in South Asia,” in Geography of Gender in the Third World, edited by J. H. Momson and J. Townsend (London: Butler & Tanner, 1987); Jocelyn Kynch, “How Many Women Are Enough? Sex Ratios and the Right to Life,” Third World Affairs 1985 (London: Third World Foundation, 1985); Amartya Sen, “Women’s Survival as a Development Problem,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 43, number 2 (1989), pp. 14–29; Ansley Coale, “Excess Female Mortality and the Balances of the Sexes in the Population: An Esti
mate of the Number of ‘Missing Females,’ ” Population and Development Review 17, number 3 (1991), pp. 517–23; Stephan Klasen, “Missing Women Reconsidered,” World Development 22 (1994).

  44. See I. Waldron, “The Role of Genetic and Biological Factors in Sex Differences in Mortality,” in Sex Differences in Mortality, edited by A. D. Lopez and L. T. Ruzicka (Canberra: Department of Demography, Australian National University, 1983).

  45. On this see my “Women’s Survival as a Development Problem,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (November 1989); revised version, “More Than a Hundred Million Women Are Missing,” The New York Review of Books, Christmas number (December 20), 1990.

  46. See Drèze and Sen, Hunger and Public Action (1989), table 4.1, p. 52. See also my “Missing Women” (1992).

  47. Coale, “Excess Female Mortality.”

  48. Stephan Klasen, “Missing Women Reconsidered,” World Development 22 (1994).

  49. Chen, Huq, and D’Souza, “Sex Bias in the Family Allocation of Food and Health Care in Rural Bangladesh” (1981), p. 7; Sen, Commodities and Capabilities (1985), appendix B, and the empirical literature cited there (also Coale, “Excess Female Mortality,” 1991).

  50. See particularly Atkinson, Social Justice and Public Policy, (1983), and his Poverty and Social Security (New York: Wheatsheaf, 1989).

  51. Harry Frankfurt, “Equality as a Moral Ideal,” Ethics 98 (1987), p. 21.

  52. I have discussed different aspects of this distinction in “From Income Inequality to Economic Inequality,” Southern Economic Journal 64 (1997).