Resources, Values, and Development: Expanded Edition

by Amartya Sen

Overview

Resources, Values and Development contains many of Amartya Sen's path-breaking contributions to development economics, including papers on resource allocation in nonwage systems, investment planning, shadow pricing, employment policy, and welfare economics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674765269
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	09/15/1997
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	560
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, Amartya Sen is Thomas W. Lamont University Professor at Harvard University. His books include Development as Freedom, The Idea of Justice, and The Argumentative Indian.

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

Part I: Institutions and Motivation

Peasants and Dualism with or without Surplus Labour

Labour Allocation in a Cooperative Enterprise

The Profit Motive

Part II: Isolation and Social Investment

On Optimizing the Rate of Saving

Isolation, Assurance and the Social Rate of Discount

Terminal Capital and Optimum Savings

On Some Debates in Capital Theory

Approaches to to the Choice of Discount Rates for Social Benefit-Cost Analysis

Part III: Shadow Pricing and Employment

Optimum Savings, Technical Choice and the Shadow Price of Labour

Control Areas and Accounting Prices: An Approach to Economic Evaluation

Employment, Institutions and Technology: Some Policy Issues

Part IV: Morals and Mores

Ethical Issues in Income Distribution: National and International

Rights and Capabilities

Poor, Relatively Speaking

Family and Food: Sex Bias in Poverty

Economics and the Family

Part V: Goods and Well-being

The Welfare Basis of Real Income Comparisons

Ingredients of Famine Analysis: Availability and

Entitlements

Development: Which Way Now?

Goods and People

Name Index

Subject Index

Editorial Reviews

Amartya Sen, [the 1998] Nobel Prizewinner in Economics, has helped give voice to the world's poor. And that is no small matter, for the very lives of the world's poor may depend on having their voices heard. In a lifetime of careful scholarship, Sen has repeatedly returned to a basic theme: even impoverished societies can improve the well-being of their least advantaged members. Societies that attend to the poorest of the poor can save their lives, promote their longevity and increase their opportunities through education and productive work. Societies that neglect the poor, on the other hand, may inadvertently allow millions to die of famine—even in the middle of an economic boom, as occurred during the great famine in Bengal, India, in 1943, the subject of Sen's most famous case study...Sen [delivers a] powerful message: annual income growth is not enough to achieve development. Societies must pay attention to social goals as well, always leaning toward their most vulnerable citizens, and overcoming deep-rooted biases to invest in the health and well-being of girls as well as boys. In a world in which 1.5 billion people subsist on less than $1 a day, this Nobel Prize can be not just a celebration of a wonderful scholar but also a clarion call to attend to the urgent needs and hopes of the world's poor.

Time - Jeffrey Sachs

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 famine. At the same time, he takes a broad view of the subject and has done much to widen the perspective of economists.

New York Review of Books - A. B. Atkinson

[Sen] has a mind like a searchlight, illuminating his material with an intense lucidity; he has a gift for looking at assumptions his colleagues have long taken for granted, and finding them defective...From the body of work represented by this book, [Sen] emerges as one of the profession's most remarkable protagonists of the forces of reason. Massively researched, scrupulously referenced...a share of these papers would be a satisfactory lifetime's achievement for many academics: but they are only a fraction of his durable and wide-ranging accomplishments. And they are written with a combination of humanity, rigor, elegance and force that puts him in the most rare and distinguished company.

London Review of Books - Robert Cassen

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 famine. At the same time, he takes a broad view of the subject and has done much to widen the perspective of economists.
— A. B. Atkinson

New York Review of Books

[Sen] has a mind like a searchlight, illuminating his material with an intense lucidity; he has a gift for looking at assumptions his colleagues have long taken for granted, and finding them defective...From the body of work represented by this book, [Sen] emerges as one of the profession's most remarkable protagonists of the forces of reason. Massively researched, scrupulously referenced...a share of these papers would be a satisfactory lifetime's achievement for many academics: but they are only a fraction of his durable and wide-ranging accomplishments. And they are written with a combination of humanity, rigor, elegance and force that puts him in the most rare and distinguished company.
— Robert Cassen

London Review of Books

Amartya Sen, [the 1998] Nobel Prizewinner in Economics, has helped give voice to the world's poor. And that is no small matter, for the very lives of the world's poor may depend on having their voices heard. In a lifetime of careful scholarship, Sen has repeatedly returned to a basic theme: even impoverished societies can improve the well-being of their least advantaged members. Societies that attend to the poorest of the poor can save their lives, promote their longevity and increase their opportunities through education and productive work. Societies that neglect the poor, on the other hand, may inadvertently allow millions to die of famine—even in the middle of an economic boom, as occurred during the great famine in Bengal, India, in 1943, the subject of Sen's most famous case study...Sen [delivers a] powerful message: annual income growth is not enough to achieve development. Societies must pay attention to social goals as well, always leaning toward their most vulnerable citizens, and overcoming deep-rooted biases to invest in the health and well-being of girls as well as boys. In a world in which 1.5 billion people subsist on less than $1 a day, this Nobel Prize can be not just a celebration of a wonderful scholar but also a clarion call to attend to the urgent needs and hopes of the world's poor.
— Jeffrey Sachs

Time