In 2006, Time magazine listed him under '60 years of Asian Heroes' and in 2010 included him in their '100 most influential persons in the world'. He is a trustee of Economists for Peace and Security. He is the first Asian and the first Indian academic to head an Oxbridge college.Īmartya Sen's books have been translated into more than thirty languages. He is also a senior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he previously served as Master from the years 1998 to 2004. Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University. Sen was best known for his work on the causes of famine, which led to the development of practical solutions for preventing or limiting the effects of real or perceived shortages of food. Technicalities and mathematical reasoning are confined to the four appendices, which (1) present a formal analysis of the notion of exchange entitlement, (2) provide illustrative models of exchange entitlement, (3) examine the problem of poverty measurement, and (4) analyse the pattern of famine mortality based on the Bengal famine of 1943.Amartya Kumar Sen is an Indian economist who was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to welfare economics and social choice theory, and for his interest in the problems of society’s poorest members. The book contains some technical economic analysis, but the text of the book has been kept as informal as possible, so that the text is accessible to the non‐technical reader, and the main lines of reasoning and their applications to the case studies are easily followed. The predominance of distributional issues, including distribution between different occupational groups, links up the problem of conceptualizing poverty with that of analysing starvation. Various approaches used in economics, sociology, and political theory are critically examined. The book also provides a general analysis of the characterization and measurement of poverty.

Aside from developing the underlying theory, the approach is used in a number of case studies of recent famines, including the Great Bengal Famine of 1943, the Ethiopian famines of 19, the Bangladesh famine of 1974, and the famines in the countries of the African Sahel in the 1970s. The author develops an alternative method of analysis-the ’entitlement approach’, which concentrates on ownership and exchange. This is shown to be fundamentally defective-it is theoretically unsound, empirically inept, and dangerously misleading for policy. The traditional analysis of famines concentrates on food supply. The main focus of this book is on the causation of starvation in general and of famines in particular.

Poverty and famine by amartya sen