Table Of ContentAMARTYA SEN
Poverty and Famines
An Essay on Entitlement
and Deprivation
Poverty and Famines
Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation
This study was prepared for the International Labour Office within the framework of the
World Employment Programme. The World Employment Programme (WEP) was
launched by the International Labour Organisation in 1969, as the ILO's main
contribution to the International Development Strategy for the Second United Nations
Development Decade.
The means of action adopted by the WEP have included the following:
- short-term high-level advisory missions;
- longer-term national or regional employment teams; and
- a wide-ranging research programme.
Through these activities the ILO has been able to help national decision-makers to
reshape their policies and plans with the aim of eradicating mass poverty and
unemployment.
A landmark in the development of the WEP was the World Employment Conference of
1976, which proclaimed inter alia that "strategies and national development plans should
include as a priority objective the promotion of employment and the satisfaction of the
basic needs of each country's population". The Declaration of Principles and Programme
of Action adopted by the Conference have become the cornerstone of WEP technical
assistance and research activities during the closing years of the Second Development
Decade.
Poverty
and
Famines
An Essay
on Entitlement
and Deprivation
AMARTYA SEN
CLARENDON PRESS OXFORD
1981
Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford OX2 6DP
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Published in the United States by
Oxford University Press, Mew York
© International Labour Organisation 1981
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Sen, Amartya
Poverty and famines.
/. Famines
/. Title
363.8 HC7Q.F3 80-42191
ISBN 0-19-828426-8
The responsibility for opinions expressed in signed studies and other contributions rests
solely with their authors, and publication does not constitute an endorsement by the
International Labour Office of the opinions expressed in them.
The designations employed and the presentation of material do not imply the expression
of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the International Labour Office concerning the
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of its frontiers.
Typeset by Macmillan India Ltd, Bangalore 1
and Printed in Great Britain
at the University Press, Oxford
by Eric Buckley
Printer to the University
To Amiya Dasgupta
who introduced me to economics
and taught me what it is about
Preface
Much about poverty is obvious enough. One does not need
elaborate criteria, cunning measurement, or probing analysis, to
recognize raw poverty and to understand its antecedents. It
would be natural to be impatient with long-winded academic
studies on 'poor naked wretches' with 'houseless heads and unfed
sides' and 'loop'd and windowed raggedness', to use King Lear's
graphic description. And furthermore it may also be the case, as
Lear told the blind Gloucester, that 'a man may see how this
world goes with no eyes'. There is indeed much that is
transparent about poverty and misery.
But not everything about poverty is quite so simple. Even the
identification of the poor and the diagnosis of poverty may be far
from obvious when we move away from extreme and raw
poverty. Different approaches can be used (e.g. biological
inadequacy, relative deprivation), and there are technical issues
to be resolved within each approach. Furthermore, to construct
an overall picture of poverty, it is necessary to go well beyond
identifying the poor. To provide an aggregate profile based on
the characteristics of those who are identified as poor, problems
of aggregation have to be squarely faced. Finally—and most
importantly—the causation of poverty raises questions that are not
easily answered. While the 'immediate' antecedents of poverty
may be too obvious to need much analysis, and the 'ultimate'
causation too vague and open-ended a question to be settled
fully, there are various intermediate levels of useful answers that
are worth exploring. The problem is of particular relevance in
the context of recent discussions on the causation of hunger and
starvation.
This monograph is concerned with these questions. The main
focus of this work is on the causation of starvation in general and
of famines in particular. The basic approach, which involves
analysing 'entitlement systems', is introduced in general terms in
Chapter i. This is done even before the concepts of poverty are
examined in any detail, because that is where the thrust of this
monograph lies. In Chapters 2 and 3 problems of conceptualiz-
ation and measurement of poverty are examined. The specific
viii Preface
problem of starvation is taken up in very general terms in
Chapter 4., and the 'entitlement approach' is analysed in Chapter
5. This is followed by case studies of famines from different parts
of the world: the Great Bengal Famine of 1943 (Chapter 6), the
Ethiopian famines of 1973-75 (Chapter 7), famines in the Sahel
region of Africa during the early 1970s (Chapter 8), and the
Bangladesh famine of 1974 (Chapter 9). In Chapter 10 the
entitlement approach is consolidated, taking up general issues of
deprivation related to entitlement systems.
There are four technical appendices. Appendix A presents a
formal analysis of the notion of exchange entitlement—an
important aspect of entitlement systems. The relevance of failures
of exchange entitlement for the development of famine situations
is brought out in Appendix B in terms of some illustrative models.
Appendix C provides an examination of the problem of poverty
measurement, including a scrutiny of various measures that have
been used or proposed. Finally, the pattern of famine mortality is
discussed in Appendix D based on a case study of the Bengal
famine of 1943.
This work has been prepared for the World Employment
Programme of ILO. I am grateful for, among other things, their
extraordinary patience; the work took a good deal longer than
they—and for that matter I—imagined it would. I am also most
grateful for helpful discussions with Felix Paukert and others
involved in the Income Distribution and Employment
Programme. I have also benefited greatly from detailed com-
ments of Judith Heyer and Jocelyn Kynch on an earlier draft of
this manuscript. For useful suggestions and advice, I am also
grateful to Mohiuddin Alamgir, Sudhir Anand, Asit
Bhattacharya, Robert Cassen, Dipankar Chatterjee, Pramit
Chaudhuri, Amiya Dasgupta, Meghnad Desai, John Flemming,
Madangopal Ghosh, David Glass, Ruth Glass, Terence Gorman,
Keith Griffin, Carl Hamilton, Roger Hay, Julius Holt, Leif
Johansen, J. Krishnamurti, Mukul Majumdar, Ashok Mitra,
John Muellbauer, Suzy Paine, Debidas Ray, Debraj Ray, Samir
Ray, Tapan Raychaudhuri, Carl Riskin, Joan Robinson,
Suman Sarkar, John Seaman, Rehman Sobhan, K. Sundaram,
Jaroslav Vanek and Henry Wan, among others.
I have drawn on my earlier writings, including articles
Preface ix
published in Economic and Political Weekly (1973, 1976), Economét-
rica (1976, 1977), Review of Economic Studies (1976), Cambridge
Journal of Economics (1977), Scandinavian Journal of Economics
(1979), Journal of Economic Literature (1979), World Development
(1980), and Quarterly Journal of Economics (1981).
Finally, a remark on presentation. While some mathematical
concepts and notation have been used in Appendices A-C, the
text of the monograph is almost entirely informal. Someone
concerned with the detailed structures would have to consult the
Appendices, but there should be no difficulty in following the
main lines of the argument (including the case studies) without
reference to them. I have tried to make the book accessible to as
wide an audience as possible, since the subject matter of this work
is important. I am also immodest enough to believe that the
analysis presented in this monograph has a certain amount of
relevance to matters of practical concern.
A.K.S.
Contents
1 Poverty and Entitlements i
2 Concepts of Poverty 9
3 Poverty: Identification and Aggregation 24
4 Starvation and Famines 39
5 The Entitlement Approach 45
6 The Great Bengal Famine 52
7 The Ethiopian Famines 86
8 Drought and Famine in the Sahel 113
9 Famine in Bangladesh 131
10 Entitlements and Deprivation 154
APPENDICES
A Exchange Entitlement 167
B Illustrative Models of Exchange Entitlement 174
C Measurement of Poverty 185
D Famine Mortality: A Case Study 195
BIBLIOGRAPHY 2 I 7
INDEXES 25O
