Sen, Amartya Kumar (1933– )

Indian economist. Having been successively (from 1963) professor of economics at Delhi University 1963–71, the London School of Economics 1971–77, and Oxford and Harvard universities, he became master of Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1998 before returning to Harvard in 2004. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1998 for his research into the social and economic causes of famine.

In Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (1981), Sen attacked the doctrine that famines in the developing world are typically caused by droughts or floods: during most famines, he argued, there is in fact an adequate food supply in the country but people starve to death because they lack the ‘entitlements’ to food, that is, the purchasing power to enter the food market. He illustrated this argument by a careful examination of the circumstances surrounding some of the most serious famines of recent years.

Sen was born in Santiniketan, Bengal, India. He received his BA from the University of Calcutta in 1953 and then went to the UK to take another BA at the University of Cambridge in 1955. He started teaching as professor of economics at Jadavpur University, Calcutta, in 1956, but soon returned to the UK to become a fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge (1957–63), completing his PhD in 1959. In 1963 he went back to India as professor of economics at Delhi University but this spell at home also ended in a return to the UK. After spending six years at the London School of Economics (1971–77), he became a professor of economics at the University of Oxford in 1977. In 1988, he moved to the USA to take up a professorship at Harvard, moving back to the UK as master of Trinity College in 1998.

He is a fellow of the British Association and was vice-president, and then president, of the Econometric Association in 1982, 1983, and 1984, the International Economic Association 1986–89, the Indian Economic Association in 1989, and the American Economic Association in 1994. He served as chair of the UN Expert Group on the Role of Advanced Skill and Technology in 1967 and as president of the Development Studies Association from 1980 to 1982. He won the Indian Mahalonobis Prize in 1976.

His publications include Collective Choice and Economic Welfare (1971), On Economic Inequality (1973), Employment, Technology and Development (1975), Commodities and Capabilities (1985), The Standard of Living (1987), and Hunger and Public Action (1989; with J Dréze).