Development as Freedom (57 page)

58.
See Hiromitsu Ishi, “Trends in the Allocation of Public Expenditure in Light of Human Resource Development—Overview in Japan” (Asian Development Bank, 1995).

59.
The nature of this connection was discussed in Drèze and Sen,
Hunger and Public Action
(1989). See also the analysis presented in World Bank,
The East Asian Miracle
(1993), and the extensive list of empirical references cited there. Also see the papers presented at the International Conference on Financing Human Resource Development, arranged by the Asian Development Bank, on November 17, 1995; many of the papers have been published in
World Development
, 1998. Fine analyses of contrasting experiences can be found in Nancy Birdsall and Richard H. Sabot,
Opportunity Forgone: Education, Growth and Inequality in Brazil
(Washington,
D.C.: World Bank, 1993); James W. McGuire, “Development Policy and Its Determinants in East Asia and Latin America,”
Journal of Public Policy
(1994).

60.
On this see Jere R. Behrman and Anil B. Deolalikar, “Health and Nutrition,” in
Handbook of Development Economics
, edited by H. B. Chenery and T. N. Srinivasan (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1988).

61.
However, because of the impossible burden of international debt, some countries, especially in Africa, may not be able to exercise much choice at all in determining their fiscal priorities. On this issue the need for “visionary” international policy as a part of “realistic” economic possibilities is forcefully advocated by Jeffrey D. Sachs, “Release the Poorest Countries from Debt Bondage,”
International Herald Tribune
, June 12–13, 1999.

62.
On this, see UNDP,
Human Development Report 1994
.

1.
The first part of this chapter draws much on my paper “Freedoms and Needs,”
New Republic
, January 10 & 17, 1994.

2.
Quoted in John F. Cooper, “Peking’s Post-Tiananmen Foreign Policy: The Human Rights Factor,”
Issues and Studies
30 (October 1994), p. 69; see also Joanne Bauer and Daniel A. Bell, eds.,
The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

3.
The analysis presented here and the discussions that follow draw on my earlier papers “Freedoms and Needs” (1994); “Legal Rights and Moral Rights: Old Questions and New Problems,”
Ratio Juris
9 (June 1996); and “Human Rights and Asian Values,” Morgenthau Memorial Lecture (New York: Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, 1997), published in a shortened form in
The New Republic
, July 14 & 21, 1997.

4.
See, among other studies, Adam Przeworski et al.,
Sustainable Democracy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Robert J. Barro,
Getting It Right: Markets and Choices in a Free Society
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996). See also Robert J. Barro and Jong-Wha Lee, “Losers and Winners in Economic Growth,” Working Paper 4341, National Bureau of Economic Research (1993); Partha Dasgupta,
An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); John Helliwell, “Empirical Linkages between Democracy and Economic Growth,” Working Paper 4066, National Bureau of Economic Research (1994); Surjit Bhalla, “Freedom and Economic Growth: A Vicious Circle?” presented at the Nobel Symposium in Uppsala on “Democracy’s Victory and Crisis,” August 1994; Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi, “Democracy and Development,” presented at the Nobel Symposium in Uppsala cited above.

5.
On this see also my joint study with Jean Drèze,
Hunger and Public Action
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), part 3.

6.
On this see my “Development: Which Way Now?”
Economic Journal
93 (December 1983) and
Resources, Values and Development
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984; 1997).

7.
It could be argued that at the time of the Irish famines in the 1840s, Ireland was part of the United Kingdom, rather than a colony. However, not only was there a great cultural gulf between the Irish population and the English rulers, with deep English skepticism of the Irish (going back at least to the sixteenth century—well reflected in Edmund Spenser’s sharp-tongued
The Faerie Queene)
, but also the division
of political powers was extremely uneven. For the purpose of the point at issue, Ireland was governed in a way not unlike the colonies ruled by alien governors. On this see Cecil Woodham-Smith,
The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845–1849
(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1962). Indeed, as Joel Mokyr has noted, “Ireland was considered by Britain as an alien and even hostile nation” (
Why Ireland Starved: A Quantitative and Analytical History of the Irish Economy, 1800–1850
[London: Allen & Unwin, 1983], p. 291).

8.
Fidel Valdez Ramos, “Democracy and the East Asian Crisis,” inaugural address at the Centre for Democratic Institutions, Australian National University, Canberra, November 26, 1998, p. 2.

9.
An important factor is the reach of deliberative politics and of the utilization of moral arguments in public debates. On these issues, see Jürgen Haberman, “Three Normative Models of Democracy,”
Constellations
1 (1994); Seyla Benhabib, “Deliberative Rationality and Models of Democratic Legitimacy,”
Constellations
1 (1994); James Bonham and William Rehg, eds.,
Deliberative Democracy
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997). See also James Fishkin,
Democracy and Deliberation
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1971); Ralf Dahrendorf,
The Modern Social Contract
(New York: Weidenfeld, 1988); Alan Hamlin and Phillip Pettit, eds.,
The Good Polity
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); Cass Sunstein,
The Partial Constitution
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); Amy Gutman and Dennis Thompson,
Democracy and Disagreement
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).

10.
This is discussed in Drèze and Sen,
Hunger and Public Action
(1989), pp. 193–7, 229–39.

11.
It is also worth noting that the environmental challenges, when adequately grasped, raise some of the central issues of social choice and deliberative politics; see my “Environmental Evaluation and Social Choice: Contingent Valuation and the Market Analogy,”
Japanese Economic Review
46 (1995).

1.
The first part of this chapter draws on my keynote address to the Inter-Parliamentary Union in the Italian Senate on the occasion of the World Food Summit in Rome, Italy, November 15, 1996. The analysis derives from my
Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), and my joint study with Jean Drèze,
Hunger and Public Action
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

2.
For an exposition of “entitlement analysis” see my
Poverty and Famines
(1981), and also Drèze and Sen,
Hunger and Public Action
(1989); Drèze and Sen, eds.,
The Political Economy of Hunger
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), and its shortened version, Drèze, Sen and Athar Hussain,
The Political Economy of Hunger: Selected Essays
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).

3.
For examples of famines arising from different causes, with little or no reduction of food output and availability, see my
Poverty and Famines
(1981), chapters 6–9.

4.
On this see my
Poverty and Famines
(1981). See also Meghnad Desai, “A General Theory of Poverty,”
Indian Economic Review
19 (1984), and “The Economics of Famine,” in
Famines
, edited by G. A. Harrison (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). See also Lucile F. Newman, ed.,
Hunger in History: Food Shortage, Poverty
,
and Deprivation
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), and going further back, Peter Garnsey,
Famine and Food Supply in the Graeco-Roman World
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

5.
A major critical survey of the literature on famines can be found in Martin Ravallion, “Famines and Economics,”
Journal of Economic Literature
35 (1997).

6.
On this see my
Poverty and Famines
(1981), chapters 7 and 8.

7.
The Bangladesh famine of 1974 is analyzed in my
Poverty and Famines
(1981), chapter 9, and also in Mohiuddin Alamgir,
Famine in South Asia
(Boston: Oelgeschlager, Gunn & Hain, 1980), and in Martin Ravallion,
Markets and Famines
(1987).

8.
On this see Ravallion,
Markets and Famines
(1987).

9.
The fact that Ireland was exporting food to England during the famines is sometimes cited as evidence that food output had not declined in Ireland. But that is an erroneous conclusion, both because we have direct evidence of a decline in Irish food output (associated with the potato epidemics), and because the movement of food is determined by relative prices, and not just by the size of food output in the exporting country. Indeed, “food countermovement” is a common phenomenon in a “slump famine” in which there is a general economic decline, which can make demand for food go down even more than the reduction of supply (on this and on related matters, see my
Poverty and Famines
[1981]). In the Chinese famines too, a much larger proportion of the reduced food output of rural China was being taken out into the urban areas as a result of official policy (on this see Carl Riskin, “Feeding China: The Experience since 1949,” in Drèze and Sen,
The Political Economy of Hunger
[1989]).

10.
There were also other factors behind the differential mortality in the Bengal famine of 1943, including the governmental decision to shelter the urban population in Calcutta through food rationing, price control and fair-price shops, leaving the rural poor thoroughly unprotected. On these and other aspects of the Bengal famine, see my
Poverty and Famines
(1981), chapter 6.

11.
It is not uncommon, in general, for the rural people to suffer more from famines than do the economically and politically more powerful urban population. Michael Lipton has analyzed the nature of the “urban bias” in a classic study:
Why Poor People Stay Poor: A Study of Urban Bias in World Development
(London: Temple Smith, 1977).

12.
On this see Alamgir,
Famine in South Asia
(1980), and my
Poverty and Famines
(1981), chapter 9. The analyses of food prices (and other causal factors) are extensively explored by Martin Ravallion, in
Markets and Famines
(1987). Ravallion also shows how the rice market exaggerated the extent of the future decline of food supply in Bangladesh, making the anticipatory price rise a good deal steeper than it need have been.

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, 1800–1
925 (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.