Co-Chair Amartya Sen

Recent statements:

• "Basic Education and Human Security" at the "WORKSHOP ON EDUCATION, EQUITY, AND SECURITY" at Kolkata, India, on January 2-4, 2002
  PDF: 56KB
• "Why Human Security" at the International Symposium on Human Security in Tokyo, Japan, on July 28, 2000
  PDF: 40KB

Amartya Sen is Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, UK, and Lamont University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. He has served as President of the Econometric Society, the Indian Economic Association, the American Economic Association and the International Economic Association. He is also Honorary President of OXFAM. Born in Santiniketan, India, in 1933, Amartya Sen studied at Presidency College in Calcutta, India, and at Trinity College, Cambridge. He is an Indian citizen. Before joining Harvard in 1987, he was the Drummond Professor of Political Economy at Oxford University and a Fellow of All Souls College. Prior to that he was Professor of Economics at Delhi University and at the London School of Economics.

Amartya Sen's books have been translated into many languages, and include Collective Choice and Social Welfare (1970), On Economic Inequality (1973, 1997), Poverty and Famines (1981), Choice, Welfare and Measurement (1982), Resources, Values and Development (1984), On Ethics and Economics (1987), The Standard of Living (1987), Inequality Reexamined (1992), and Development as Freedom (1999), among others. His research has ranged over a number of fields in economics, philosophy, and decision theory, including social choice theory, welfare economics, theory of measurement, development economics, moral and political philosophy, and the economics of peace and war. His next book, Rationality, Freedom and Justice, in two volumes, will be published by Harvard University Press as a Bellknap Book, in 2002.

Amartya Sen has received honorary doctorates from major universities in North America, Europe and Asia. Among the awards he has received are the "Bharat Ratna" (the highest honour awarded by the President of India); the Frank E. Seidman Distinguished Award in Political Economy; the Senator Giovanni Agnelli International Prize in Ethics; the Alan Shawn Feinstein World Hunger Award; the Edinburgh Medal; the Brazilian Ordem do Merito Cientifico (Grã-Cruz); the Presidency of the Italian Republic Medal; the Eisenhower Medal; Honorary Companion of Honour (U.K.); and the Nobel Prize in Economics.