Development as Freedom

by Sen, Amartya

  13. Encyclopaedia Britannica, nth edition (Cambridge, 1910–1911), volume 10, p. 167.

  14. See A. Loveday, The History and Economics of Indian Famines (London: G. Bell, 1916), and also my Poverty and Famines (1981), chapter 4.

  15. On this see Alex de Waal, Famines That Kill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). See also my Poverty and Famines, appendix D, on the pattern of famine mortality in the Bengal famine of 1943.

  16. The analysis here utilizes my essays “Famine as Alienation,” in State, Market and Development: Essays in Honour of Rehman Sobban, edited by Abu Abdullah and Azizur Rahman Khan (Dhaka: University Press, 1996), and “Nobody Need Starve,” Granta 52 (1995).

  17. On this see Robert James Scally, The End of Hidden Ireland (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

  18. See Cormac O Grada, Ireland before and after the Famine: Explorations in Economic History, 1800–1925 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), and The Great Irish Famine (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989).

  19. Terry Eagleton, Heath cliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London: Verso, 1995), pp. 25–6.

  20. For analyses of the Irish famines, see Joel Mokyr, Why Ireland Starved: A Quantitative and Analytical History of the Irish Economy, 1800–1850 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1983); Cormac O Grada, Ireland before and after the Famine (1988) and The Great Irish Famine (1989); and Pat McGregor, “A Model of Crisis in a Peasant Economy,” Oxford Economic Papers 42 (1990). The issue of landlessness is particularly serious in the context of famines in South Asia and to some extent sub-Saharan Africa; see Keith Griffin and Azizur Khan, eds., Poverty and Landlessness in Rural Asia (Geneva: ILO, 1977), and Alamgir, Famine in South Asia (1980).

  21. On this see Alamgir, Famine in South Asia (1980), and Ravallion, Markets and Famines (1987). See also Nurul Islam, Development Planning in Bangladesh: A Study in Political Economy (London: Hurst; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977).

  22. On food “countermovement,” see Sen, Poverty and Famines (1981); Graciela Chichilnisky, “North-South Trade with Export Enclaves: Food Consumption and Food Exports,” mimeographed, Columbia University, 1983; Drèze and Sen, Hunger and Public Action (1989).

  23. Mokyr, Why Ireland Starved (1983), p. 291. On different aspects of this complex relationship, see R. Fitzroy Foster, Modern Ireland 1600–1972 (London: Penguin, 1989).

  24. See Mokyr’s balanced assessment of this line of diagnosis in Why Ireland Starved (1983), pp. 291–2.

  25. On this see Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845–1849 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1962); also O Grada, The Great Irish Famine (1989), and Eagleton, Heath cliff and the Great Hunger (1995). Ireland’s subsequent history has also been deeply influenced by the famine and thus by the treatment it received from London; see Scally, The End of Hidden Ireland (1995).

  26. See Andrew Roberts, Eminent Churchillians (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994), p. 213.

  27. Quoted in Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger (1962), p. 76.

  28. The relevance of moral reasoning in the prevention of hunger and famines has been illuminatingly analyzed by Onora O’Neil, Faces of Hunger: An Essay on Poverty, Justice and Development (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986). See also P. Sainath, Everybody Loves a Good Drought (New Delhi: Penguin, 1996); Helen O’Neill and John Toye, eds., A World Without Famine? New Approaches to Aid and Development (London: Macmillan, 1998); Joachim von Braun, Tesfaye Teklu and Patricia Webb, Famine in Africa: Causes, Responses, Prevention (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).

  29. There is a large literature on this, which is discussed and critically assessed in Drèze and Sen, Hunger and Public Action (1989), chapter 9. See also C. K. Eicher, Transforming African Agriculture (San Francisco: The Hunger Project, 1986); M. S. Swaminathan, Sustainable Nutritional Security for Africa (San Francisco: The Hunger Project, 1986); M. Glantz, ed., Drought and Hunger in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); J. Mellor, C. Delgado and C. Blackie, eds., Accelerating Food Production in Sub-Saharan Africa (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). See also the papers of Judith Heyer, Francis Idachaba, Jean-Philippe Platteau, Peter Svedberg and Sam Wangwe in The Political Economy of Hunger, edited by Drèze and Sen (1990).

  30. See Drèze and Sen, Hunger and Public Action (1989), table 2.4, p. 33.

  31. On this see Drèze and Sen, Hunger and Public Action (1989), chapter 8, and the papers of Drèze in Drèze and Sen, The Political Economy of Hunger (1990).

  32. On the mechanics of such procedures see Drèze and Sen, Hunger and Public Action (1989), chapter 8, and the papers of Jean Drèze in Drèze and Sen, The Political Economy of Hunger (1990).

  33. On this see Drèze and Sen, Hunger and Public Action (1989), chapter 8.

  34. On this and related issues, see my Poverty and Famines (1981), and Drèze and Sen, Hunger and Public Action (1989).

  35. The comparative picture is presented in Drèze and Sen, Hunger and Public Action (1989), chapter 8.

  36. See Basil Ashton, Kenneth Hill, Alan Piazza and Robin Zeitz, “Famine in China 1958–61,” Population and Development Review 10 (1984).

  37. See T. P. Bernstein, “Stalinism, Famine, and Chinese Peasants,” Theory and Society 13 (1984), p. 13. See also Carl Riskin, China’s Political Economy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).

  38. Quoted in Mao Tse-tung, Mao Tse-tung Unrehearsed, Talks and Letters: 1956–1971, edited by Stuart R. Schram (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), pp. 277–8. See also the discussion of this statement in Ralph Miliband, Marxism and Politics (London: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 149–50.

  39. On this see also Ralph Miliband, Marxism and Politics (1977), p. 151.

  40. On this see also Drèze and Sen, Hunger and Public Action (1989).

  41. An “internal” account of the IMF’s general strategy of crisis prevention and long-run reform in East and Southeast Asia can be found in Timothy Lane, Atish R. Ghosh, Javier Hamann, Steven Phillips, Marianne Schultz-Ghattas and Tsidi Tsikata, IMF-Supported Programs in Indonesia, Korea and Thailand: A Preliminary Assessment (Washington, D.C.: International Monetary Fund, 1999).

  42. See James D. Wolfensohn, The Other Crisis: Address to the Board of Governors of the World Bank (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1998).

  43. Destitution can result not only from natural catastrophes or economic slumps, but also from wars and military conflicts; on this see my “Economic Regress: Concepts and Features,” in Proceedings of the World Bank Annual Conference on Development Economics 1993 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1994). On the general role of militarism as a modern scourge, see also John Kenneth Galbraith, “The Unfinished Business of the Century,” mimeographed, lecture at the London School of Economics, June 28, 1999.

  44. See Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini, “Is Inequality Harmful to Growth? Theory and Evidence,” American Economic Review 84 (1994); Alberto Alesina and Dani Rodrik, “Distributive Politics and Economic Growth,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 108 (1994); Albert Fishlow, C. Gwin, S. Haggard, D. Rodrik and S. Wade, Miracle or Design? Lessons from the East Asian Experience (Washington, D.C.: Overseas Development Council, 1994). See also the contrast with India (and South Asia in general), in Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995). The lower level of inequality of this kind does not, however, guarantee the kind of equity that democratic politics can bring at times of crisis and acute deprivation. Indeed, as Jong-Il You notes, in these countries (including South Korea) “low inequality and high profit shares coexisted primarily due to the unusually even distribution of wealth” (“Income Distribution and Growth in East Asia,” Journal of Development Studies 34 [1998]). In this, the past history of Korea, including prior land reforms, widespread development of human capital through educational expansion, and so on, seems to have played a very positive part.

  Chapter 8: Women’s Agency and Social Change

  1. I have discussed this issue in some previous works, including
: “Economics and the Family,” Asian Development Review 1 (1983); “Women, Technology and Sexual Divisions,” Trade and Development 6 (1985); “Missing Women,” British Medical Journal 304 (March 1992); “Gender and Cooperative Conflict,” Persistent Inequalities: Women and World Development, edited by Irene Tinker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); “Gender Inequality and Theories of Justice,” Women, Culture and Development: A Study of Human Capabilities, edited by Martha Nussbaum and Jonathan Glover (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); (jointly with Jean Drèze) India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995); “Agency and Well-Being: The Development Agenda,” in A Commitment to the Women, edited by Noeleen Heyzer (New York: UNIFEM, 1996).

  2. My paper “Well-Being, Agency and Freedom: The Dewey Lectures 1984,” Journal of Philosophy 82 (April 1985), investigates the philosophical distinction between the “agency aspect” and the “well-being aspect” of a person, and attempts to identify the far-reaching practical implications of this distinction, applied to many different fields.

  3. Alternative statistical estimates of the extent of “extra mortality” of women in many countries in Asia and North Africa also are discussed in my Resources, Values and Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984); (jointly with Jean Drèze) Hunger and Public Action (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). See also Stephan Klasen, “ ‘Missing Women’ Reconsidered,” World Development 22 (1994).

  4. There is a vast literature on this; my own attempts at analyzing and using the available evidence can be found in “Gender and Cooperative Conflict” (1990), and “More Than a Hundred Million Women Are Missing,” New York Review of Books, (Christmas number, December 20, 1990).

  5. These issues have been discussed in my Resources, Values and Development (1984), “Gender and Cooperative Conflict” (1990), and “More Than a Hundred Million Women Are Missing” (1990). A pioneering study of this general field was presented in Ester Boserup’s classic work, Women’s Role in Economic Development (London: Allen & Unwin, 1971). The recent literature on gender inequality in developing countries includes a number of interesting and important studies of different types of determining variables. See, for example, Hanna Papanek, “Family Status and Production: The ‘Work’ and ‘Non-Work’ of Women,” Signs 4 (1979). Martha Loutfi, ed., Rural Work: Unequal Partners in Development (Geneva: ILO, 1980); Mark R. Rosenzweig and T. Paul Schultz, “Market Opportunities, Genetic Endowment and Intrafamily Resource Distribution,” American Economic Review 72 (1982); Myra Buvinic, M. Lycette and W. P. McGreevy, eds., Women and Poverty in the Third World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); Pranab Bardhan, Land, Labor and Rural Poverty (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984); Devaki Jain and Nirmala Banerjee, eds., Tyranny of the Household: Investigative Essays in Women’s Work (New Delhi: Vikas, 1985); Gita Sen and C. Sen, “Women’s Domestic Work and Economic Activity,” Economic and Political Weekly 20 (1985); Martha Alter Chen, A Quiet Revolution: Women in Transition in Rural Bangladesh (Dhaka: BRAC, 1986); Jere Behrman and B. L. Wolfe, “How Does Mother’s Schooling Affect Family Health, Nutrition, Medical Care Usage and Household Sanitation?” Journal of Econometrics 36 (1987); Monica Das Gupta, “Selective Discrimination against Female Children in Iiidia,” Population and Development Review 13 (1987); Gita Sen and Caren Grown, Development, Crises and Alternative Visions: Third World Women’s Perspectives (London: Earthscan, 1987); Alaka Basu, Culture, the Status of Women and Demographic Behaviour (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Nancy Folbre, Barbara Bergmann, Bina Agarwal and Maria Flore, eds., Women’s Work in the World Economy (London: Macmillan, 1992); United Nations ESCAP, Integration of Women’s Concerns into Development Planning in Asia and the Pacific (New York: United Nations, 1992); Bina Agarwal, A Field of One’s Own (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Edith Kuiper and Jolande Sap, with Susan Feiner, Notburga Ott and Zafiris Tzannatos, Out of the Margin: Feminist Perspectives on Economics (New York: Routledge, 1995); among other contributions.

  6. Gender divisions within the family are sometimes studied as “bargaining problems”; the literature includes, among many other contributions, Marilyn Manser and Murray Brown, “Marriage and Household Decision Making: A Bargaining Analysis,” International Economic Review 21 (1980); M. B. McElroy and M. J. Horney, “Nash Bargained Household Decisions: Toward a Generalization of Theory of Demand,” International Economic Review 22 (1981); Shelley Lundberg and Robert Pollak, “Noncooperative Bargaining Models of Marriage,” American Economic Review 84 (1994). For approaches different from that of “bargaining models,” see Sen, “Women, Technology and Sexual Divisions” (1985); Nancy Folbre, “Hearts and Spades: Paradigms of Household Economics,” World Development 14 (1986); J. Brannen and G. Wilson, eds., Give and Take in Families (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987); Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989); Sen, “Gender and Cooperative Conflict” (1990); Marianne A. Ferber and Julie A. Nelson, eds., Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993); among other contributions. Useful collections of papers on these issues can also be found in Jane Humphries, ed., Gender and Economics (Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 1995), and Nancy Folbre, ed., The Economics of the Family (Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 1996).

  7. On this see Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family (1989); Drèze and Sen, Hunger and Public Action (1989); Sen, “Gender and Cooperative Conflict” (1990); Nussbaum and Glover, Woman, Culture and Development (1995). See also the papers of Julie Nelson, Shelley Lundberg, Robert Pollak, Diana Strassman, Myra Strober and Viviana Zelizer in the 1994 Papers and Proceedings in American Economic Review 84 (1994).

  8. This issue has started receiving considerable attention in India. See Asoke Mitra, Implications of Declining Sex Ratios in India’s Population (Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1980); Jocelyn Kynch and Amartya Sen, “Indian Women: Well-Being and Survival,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 7 (1983); Bardhan, Land, Labor and Rural Poverty (1984); Jain and Banerjee, eds., Tyranny of the Household (1985). The “survival problem” relates to the broader issue of neglect, on which see also the studies presented in Swapna Mukhopadhyay, ed., Women’s Health, Public Policy and Community Action (Delhi: Manohar, 1998), and Swapna Mukhopadhyay and R. Savithri, Poverty, Gender and Reproductive Choice (Delhi: Manohar, 1998).

  9. On this see Tinker, Persistent Inequalities (1990). My own paper in this collection (“Gender and Cooperative Conflict”) goes into the economic and social influences that affect the divisions within the family, and discusses why the divisions vary so much between regions (for example, antifemale bias being much stronger in South Asia, West Asia, North Africa and China than in sub-Saharan Africa or Southeast Asia), and also within different areas inside the same country (for example, gender bias at this level being very strong in some Indian states, such as Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, and effectively absent in Kerala). There are also close linkages between different influences on women’s relative position, such as those connecting legal rights and basic education (since the use of legal provisions relates to the ability to read and write); see Salma Sobhan, Legal Status of Women in Bangladesh (Dhaka: Bangladesh Institute of Legal and International Affairs, 1978).

  10. The role of gender divisions in the sharing of hunger has been illuminatingly studied by Megan Vaughan, The Story of an African Famine: Hunger, Gender and Politics in Malawi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Barbara Harriss, “The Intrafamily Distribution of Hunger in South Asia,” in The Political Economy of Hunger, edited by Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1990), among others.

  11. Some of these issues have been discussed in the specific context of India, with comparisons within and outside India in Drèze and Sen, India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity (1995); see also Alaka Basu, Culture, the Status of Women and Demographic Behaviour (1992), and Agarwal, A Field of One’s Own, (1995). The different sources of disadvantage are particularly important to study in
analyzing the special deprivation of groups with little economic or social leverage—for example, widows, especially from poorer families. On that, see Martha Alter Chen, ed., Widows in India (New Delhi: Sage, 1998), and her forthcoming book, Perpetual Mourning: Widowhood in Rural India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999; Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).

  12. On the issues involved, see my “Gender and Cooperative Conflict,” in Tinker, Persistent Inequalities (1990), and the literature cited there.

  13. See L. Beneria, ed., Women and Development: The Sexual Division of Labor in Rural Societies (New York: Praeger, 1982). See also Jain and Banerjee, Tyranny of the Household (1985); Gita Sen and Grown, Development, Crises and Alternative Visions (1987); Haleh Afshar, ed., Women and Empowerment: Illustrations from the Third World (London: Macmillan, 1998).

  14. See Mamta Murthi, Anne-Catherine Guio and Jean Drèze, “Mortality, Fertility and Gender Bias in India: A District Level Analysis,” Population and Development Review 21 (December 1995). See also Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen. eds., Indian Development: Selected Regional Perspectives (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996). Questions can certainly be raised about the direction of causation in the identified relations—for example, whether women’s literacy influences the status and standing of women in the family or whether women’s higher standing inclines a family to send young girls to school. There could be, statistically, also a third factor that correlates with both. And yet recent empirical studies suggest that most families—even in socially backward areas in India—seem to have a strong preference for educating the children, including girls. One large survey indicates that the proportion of parents who think it is “important” to send girls to school even in the states with the least female literacy is remarkably high: 85 percent in Rajasthan, 88 percent in Bihar, 92 percent in Uttar Pradesh, and 93 percent in Madhya Pradesh. The main barrier to the education of girls appears to be the absence of convenient schools in the neighborhood—a major difference between high-literacy and low-literacy states. See the Probe Team, Public Report on Basic Education in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999). Public policy, therefore, has a central role to play. There have been recent public policy initiatives with good effect on literacy, especially in Himachal Pradesh, and more recently in West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh and a few other states.