This is a ppt I created for my University seminar presentation on Sen's welfare views. His work produced a new understanding of the catastrophes that plague society's poorest people and helps to explain the economic mechanisms underlying famines and poverty. He is best known for his book Poverty and Famine: an essay on entitlement and deprivation.

1. ASeminaron
SEN’S WELFARE VIEWS
Presented to:
Dr. N. Prasanna
Professor & Head
(i/c)
Department of
economics
Bharathidasan
University
Tiruchirapalli – 24.
Presented by:
Susmitha Subramanian
I M.A Economics
Department of Economics
Bharathidasan University
Tiruchirapalli – 24.

2. Amartya Kumar Sen

3. Sen’s welfare views

4. Individual values and collective decision
• General agreement – no controversy
• When opinions differ, there’s a need to bring together every
opinion.
• Sen’s seminal work – collective choice and social Welfare
(published-1970) offered an answer to Kenneth Arrow’s
impossibility theorem
• Arrow’s axioms leads to impossibility of social welfare
function but Sen’s has alleviated this pessimism.
• These are caused by inadequate basic education, a low level
of health services, poor ownership pattern, skewed social
stratification and rising gender inequalities.
• Sen argues - variations in social opportunities can be reduced
by political protests and opposition.

5. Social choice theory
• This theory is preoccupied with the link between the previous two
factors
• It gave him a framework to tackle practical political issues mainly
social progress
• Traditionally, NI statistics like GNP and GDP for social progress
measurement
• Sen dismissed these as totally insufficient
• Failed to capture Y distribution issues
• Well being and freedom depends on many non –Y influences

6. Individual entitlement
• Analysing relationship b/w rights, interpersonal obligations and individual entitlement to things
• Sen hypothesized that ‘ most cases of starvation and famines arise from people not being entitled in the
prevailing legal system of institutional rights, to adequate means for survival.’
• A range of other variables other than agricultural productivity and aggregate food supply can undermine a
person’s entitlement to food
• People are unable to trade their labour power or skills
• Challenging the approaches to general equilibrium analysis that rule out the possibility of starvation death
• Shift focus on international attention away from statistics describing per capita calories and food supplies and
differential ability of individuals
• The UN Special Reporters on the Human Right to Food has recommended that first step in a national food
security strategy is to map situation for different groups taking into account a range of variables
including occupation, gender, ethnicity, race and rural/urban location.

7. Capability Approach
An alternative to welfarism has been provided by Sen in the “capabilities” approach.
Capability refers to the freedom that a person has in terms of choice of
functionings, which refer to what a person can achieve (such as being able to take
part in the life of the Community).
Sen has argued that, in the chain Capability comes closest to the notion of standard of
living”.
Commodities Characteristics Capability Utility
Sen says, “A functioning is an achievement, whereas a capability is the ability to
achieve and both are closely related.”
Functionings are in a sense, more directly related to living conditions, since there are
different aspects of living conditions.
Capabilities, in contrast, are notions of freedom; what real opportunities you have
regarding the life you may lead.

8. • Sen advocated new approaches to thinking about fundamental freedoms and human rights
• Sen has defended the validity of expressions like freedom from hunger, freedom from
malaria, freedom from epidemics in this context.
• Lack of substantive freedom
• Different cases
1. Sometimes directly relates to economic poverty
2. Unfreedom links closely to lack for public facilities
3. Denial of political and civil liberties
• Human rights are fulfilled when the persons involved enjoy secure access to the freedom or
resource covered by the right
• He argued that broad traditions from which the idea of HR has emerged- traditions of
universalism, tolerance, freedom, respect for human dignity, concern for the poor,
needy and exploited, and if interpersonal obligations and Govt. Responsibility have
historical roots in non-western societies.
• He highlighted the ideas if Confucius, Ashoka, Kautilya, and Akbar in this context.
Sen on Substantive freedom

9. Sen’s Poverty index
Researches on the economics of poverty led Sen (1973, 1976, 1981) to the
specification of an axiomatic structure of a new poverty measure known as Sen’s
index.
In fact, the Sen measure evaluating poverty and assessing inequality combines
three distinctive characteristics of the interpersonal profile of poverty:
1. The head-count ratio H.
2. The income gap ratio I, as a proportion of the poverty line, and
3. The Gini-co-efficient G of income distribution among the poor derived on the
basis of a Lorenz curve.
S = H[I + (1-I)G]
S (Sen’s Index of Poverty) should vary between 0 and 1.

10. Sen’s study on famine
• Sen showed that the famine resulted not from a lack of food but from an extremely uneven distribution
of food caused by a very unequal distribution of income.
• For example, the 1974 famine in Bangladesh occurred despite the fact that per capita food availability
was higher that year than it had been in the previous two years or was in the next year.
• Weather-related disruption of planting activities – no food for unemployed – starvation - more affluent
people began buying and hoarding large amounts of food, driving up its price and making it even further
out of reach for the poor.
• A contributing factor was that U.S. food shipments were held up during the famine (due to a dispute
about Bangladeshi exports to Cuba), but the main failures were those of the government of Bangladesh.
• Sen argued that governmental indifference to the plight of the very poor: “Famine is entirely avoidable if
the government has the incentive to act in time . . . No democratic country with a relatively free press
has ever experienced a major famine.”

11. Conclusion
As far as Amartya Sen’s works are concerned we observe and conclude that several governments and
international organizations handling food crises were influenced by Sen’s work.
Asia’s first NP winner in modern welfare economics said poverty, inequality and deprivation should be
brought more into public
His views encouraged policy-makers to pay attention not only to alleviating immediate suffering but also
to finding ways to replace the lost income of the poor, as, for example, through public-works projects, and
to maintain stable prices for food.
A vigorous defender of political freedom, Sen believed that famines do not occur in functioning
democracies because their leaders must be more responsive to the demands of the citizens.
He earnestly believed as a profound economic thinker that in order for economic growth to be achieved,
he argued, social reforms, such as improvements in education and public health, must precede economic
reform.

12. References
• Book
Economic thoughts of Amartya Sen. (2012). Indian Economic Association.
• Website
1. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=ht
tps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amartya_Sen&ved=2ahUKEwjbv9669IaFAxX
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