Amartya Sen

Amartya Kumar Sen (Bengali: অমর্ত্য সেন; born 3 November 1933) is an Indian economist and philosopher who since 1972 has taught and worked in the United Kingdom and the United States. He has made contributions to welfare economics, social choice theory, economic and social justice, economic theories of famines, and indexes of the measure of well-being of citizens of developing countries. He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998 for his work in welfare economics. He is currently the Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University. Early life and education[edit] Sen was born in a Bengali Vaidya family in Manikganj, Bangladesh, to Ashutosh Sen and Amita Sen. Meanwhile, Sen was elected to a Prize Fellowship at Trinity College, which gave him four years of freedom to do anything he liked; he made the radical decision to study philosophy. To Sen, Cambridge was like a battlefield. Professorships[edit]

Social choice theory Social choice theory or social choice is a theoretical framework for analysis of combining individual opinions, preferences, interests, or welfares to reach a collective decision or social welfare in some sense.[1] A non-theoretical example of a collective decision is enacting a law or set of laws under a constitution. Social choice theory dates from Condorcet's formulation of the voting paradox. Kenneth Arrow's Social Choice and Individual Values (1951) and Arrow's impossibility theorem in it are generally acknowledged as the basis of the modern social choice theory.[1] Social choice blends elements of welfare economics and voting theory. Social choice and public choice theory may overlap but are disjoint if narrowly construed. Interpersonal utility comparison[edit] Social choice theory depends upon the ability to aggregate, or sum up, individual preferences into a combined social welfare function. Sen proposes, however, that comparability of interpersonal utility need not be partial.

Singer–Prebisch thesis The Singer–Prebisch thesis (also Prebisch–Singer thesis, PST, or Prebisch–Singer hypothesis) postulates that terms of trade, between primary products and manufactured goods, deteriorate in time. In 1950, the economists Raúl Prebisch and Hans Singer independently developed the thesis that countries that export commodities (developing countries) in time would import fewer manufactured goods relative to a given level of exports. However, during the 2000s commodities boom, the terms of trade of most developing countries improved while east Asia (with much of its export to be manufactured goods) has deteriorated terms of trade.[1] Thesis[edit] Singer and Prebisch examined data over a long period of time suggesting that the terms of trade for primary commodity exporters did have a tendency to decline. A common explanation for the phenomenon is the observation that the income elasticity of demand for manufactured goods is greater than that for primary products—especially food. History[edit]

The World Economy