The Contributions of Amartya Sen to Welfare Economics

Introduction Amartya Sen occupies a unique position among modern economists. He is an outstanding economic theorist, a world authority on social choice and welfare economics; he is a leading figure in development economics, carrying out path-breaking work on appraising the effectiveness of investment in poor countries and, more recently, on the economic analysis of famines. He has greatly influenced international organisations such as the United Nations agencies, the ILO, and the World Bank. At the same time, he takes a broad view of the subject and has done much to enlarge the perspective of economists. He is as much at home writing for the Journal of Philosophy as for the Economic Journal; at Harvard, he was both Professor of Economics and Professor of Philosophy. The unusually wide range of Sen's research means that it is impossible to do justice to his contributions in the space available. The Nobel citation refers specifically to "Social Choice, Welfare Distributions, and Poverty", but this is still a vast domain. Even leaving aside Social Choice and other areas covered by Professor Arrow in his article, I have had to be highly selective. Section 1 deals with welfare economics and Sen's critique of welfarism; Section 2 with the measurement of economic inequality and poverty; Section 3 with Sen's contributions to development economics and the implementation of his concept of capabilities.