GENDER ISSUES IN THE CONTEXT OF AMARTYASEN’S DEVELOPMENT AS FREEDOM: WORLD DEVELOPMENT REPORT 2012—AN EMPIRICAL APPROACH

Ever since the late seventies, AmartyaSen has been promoting an alternative conception of welfare economics, his Capability Approach (CA). The CA tries to reconcile two seemingly adverse positions: utilitarianism and Rawls’ theory of social justice. For Sen, for many evaluative purposes, the appropriate space is that of ‘the substantive freedoms-the capabilities-to choose a life one has reason to value’. It is crucial to note that he does not say ‘one values’ but ‘one has reason to value’, the difference being that the latter allows for external scrutiny, whereas the former is hyper-individualistic. Since 1990, UNDP based loosely on Sen’s CA, developed a suite of measures which capture key capabilities, particularly health and longevity, education, as well as access to nutrition, shelter, clothing and related capabilities. The HDI (Human Development Index) captures this using a standardized index for life expectancy, literacy and enrolment, and a logarithmic transformation of per capita incomes. In 1995, the Gender-RelatedDevelopment Index (GDI) and the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) were added to capture the gender dimensions of human development. In 1996, two Human Poverty Measures were introduced, to capture poverty in developing and industrialized countries respectively.