La obra de Amartya Sen

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to present the work of Amartya Sen. Sen was born the year 1933 in Santiniketan, West Bengala (India). He studied at Calcutta University and later in Cambridge (United Kingdom). He has been teaching in different Universities in India, United Kingdom and the United States. He has also been President of different professional associations and has influenced in several international institutions such as the World Bank and different UN agencies. He received in 1998 the Nobel Prize in Economics for his contributions in the field of welfare economics.

It's no wonder that his extensive work occupies a fully deserved place in the field of political economy and has also generated a considerable controversy in this of political philosophy. His economic contributions cover a broad agenda, from social choice theory to inequalities, including methodologies for their measurement. He has also covered the fields of welfare economics and the theory of justice, arguing with John Rawls. His work, globally considered, gravitates around the problems of economic development, from a global and explicit perspective; so, in his book on the subject synthesis Development as Freedom, published in 1999, Sen indicates that “the expansion of freedom in his approach is both the primary purpose of development and the primary means”.

His philosophical background allows him to deal rigorously non-current topics for economists or to incorporate philosophical thoughts in an economic discourse. This aspect may be surprising because it is common that the philosophical- ethical dimension –the ideological dimension– is implicit, non-visible in a text apparently analytical and neutral.