Amartya Sen's Contribution to Development Economics

Abstract

Amartya Sen has been writing about development issues since the mid-1950s, most notably, but far from exclusively, in the 1960s. As a young man he was influenced by Tagore, by Nehru and by his teachers in Calcutta and Cambridge. He generally adopted an anti-market, anti-neoclassical stance. In the period 1957‐76 Sen worked on choice of techniques, surplus labour in Indian agriculture and the rationale for import substitution in Indian planning; a group of issues relating to "pervasive suboptimality", which led to development of the concept of shadow pricing. The second phase came from 1976 onwards when there was a shift from suboptimality to what can be termed "humane economics", which challenges conventional utility theory. It began with applied work on the Bengal famine, leading to the concept of "entitlement", and branched outwards into intensive studies of poverty and deprivation. The end result is the creation of a new set of concepts in economics and philosophy with human concerns at the centre. This by passes many central preoccupations of economists and shifts work on development on to new ground.