Alexander, John

Decancq, Koen

English

Research Papers in Economics

Economic and Political Weekly January 6, 2007 35
Reviews
Rights, Deprivation and Disparity:
Essays in Concepts and
Measurement
by S Subramanian;
Oxford University Press,
New Delhi, 2006;
pp 298, Rs 625.
JOHN M ALEXANDER, KOEN DECANCQ
T
his anthology of scholarly and engag-
ing essays provides an overview and
a unitary vision of S Subramanian’s key
contributions in the fields of development
economics, social choice theory and social
ethics. It will be a very valuable volume
not only for scholars and academic re-
searchers but also for policy-makers and
public officials working in these areas.
The book gathers together 20 essays many
of which have been published earlier in
leading economics journals and starts with
a comprehensive introduction that eluci-
dates the link between the different essays
and their embeddedness in the corpus of
related literature. Amartya Sen’s work on
social choice theory and the capability
approach is an especially important point
of departure for many essays and plays a
key role in the author’s contributions. In
incorporating the concerns of positive
rights into the formal social choice frame-
work, Sen’s liberal paradox serves as a
starting point. Furthermore, on issues of
aggregation and identification of depriva-
tion and disparity, Sen’s work on the
construction of social welfare functions
and the measurement of poverty and in-
equality plays an important role.
Every theoretician working on develop-
ment issues faces the challenging task of
bridging the gap between the underlying
concepts and their measurement. We might
have rich and sound concepts but if they
cannot be tangibly measured, they tend to
remain empty ideas, without having any
implication for social or development
policy. At the same time, the possibilities
for accurate measurability per se need not
be a definitive argument for or against the
value of a theoretical concept. However,
we can have informed policy debates and
proceed in the direction of devising effec-
tive social policies only when we make
progress on both fronts, without giving
into the easy temptation of settling for a
lopsided approach. This review elaborates
and examines a few examples in order to
show how inquiries of concepts and
measurement have mutually enriched the
work of Subramanian and set the agenda
for further research and reflection.
Positive Rights
The first chapter of the book focuses on
the conceptualisation of basic needs and
positive rights and how their fulfilment
can be used as a measure of the goodness
of a society. Rights have come to occupy
a central place in social ethics. In the
economic and philosophical discussion on
rights, one might broadly distinguish two
complementary perspectives. The first
perspective focuses on the idea that indi-
viduals have certain rights and that these
rights set important limits on the interfer-
ence of others, fellow citizens or the state.
These rights are normally labelled as
“negative” rights; Sen introduced them in
the formal social choice and demonstrated
how they conflict with the Pareto principle,
the cornerstone of social choice. The
second “positive” perspective of rights
puts emphasis not only on the absence of
interference but also the presence of cer-
tain basic capabilities and the required
material and social resources to realise
them. Hence, the feasibility constraints
that prevent persons from attaining their
desired ends can be seen as rights viola-
tion. This second perspective assumes
special significance in the context of
developing countries with scarce or un-
equally distributed resources. In this con-
text, the libertarian view that private
ownership and related things should un-
conditionally be defended and that there
is no violation of rights when people face
serious capability deprivation is inadequate
from a moral point of view. Subramanian
therefore makes an interesting proposal on
introducing positive rights into the social
choice literature. This framework leads
quickly to impossibilities similar to the
ones that Sen himself faced when intro-
ducing negative rights. Moreover, there is
the fundamental philosophical objection
that social choice is not the appropriate
forum to address the concerns of rights.
Nevertheless, an attempt at a formal treat-
ment of positive rights makes clear their
important role as indications of how a
society is doing in guaranteeing its citi-
zens certain elementary freedoms. Sum-
mary statistics on poverty, literacy, nutri-
tion, employment, housing, life expect-
ancy and so on should therefore be im-
portant components in the measurement
of a country’s performance. These play a
relevant role in empowering citizens with
the freedom to realise certain fundamental
rights such as the right not to be poor, the
right to be literate and the right not to be
hungry. Efforts to construct multidimen-
sional indices of well-being such as the
human development index or the multiple
development targets entailed in the mil-
lennium development goals can be seen
as a reflection of this underlying concern
with the importance of positive rights.
Conceptualising Poverty
A second example of the connectedness
between concepts and measurement can
be found in Chapter 10, on the measure-
ment of poverty in India. There exists a
consensus of opinion that poverty in India
– as measured by the headcount ratio –
has displayed a downward trend since the
early 1970s. Subramanian, however, chal-
lenges this optimistic conclusion by point-
ing out that this conclusion draws heavily
on an unsound concept of poverty. The
common practice in the Indian poverty
Concepts and Measurement
of Development
Bridging the GapEconomic and Political Weekly January 6, 2007 36
literature is to identify the poor by com-
paring the value of an individual’s con-
sumption bundle with the value of a ref-
erence bundle of someone at the nutri-
tional minimum in 1973. Throughout the
years, the reference consumption bundle
remained identical and hence neglects
changes in tastes and relative prices. A
simulation shows the large effect of this
approach on the obtained poverty trend for
India. Correcting for the neglected factors
alters the optimistic picture of decreasing
poverty into a gloomy one of increasing
poverty over the last 25 years. Given this
conceptual impreciseness, Subramanian
urges a more careful and rigorous approach
of the derivation of an appropriate poverty
line for India. Lessons can be drawn from
the experience of other countries, who
apply different methodologies, e g, the
European countries, which pinpoint their
poverty line at a certain percentage of the
median income. In the meanwhile, the
author advocates a moratorium on the
continued use of the official Indian statis-
tics on income poverty. The reader may
find this conclusion rather disappointing
and not so constructive particularly because
an acceptable measurement of Indian
poverty cannot endlessly wait until we
come up with the ideal concept of poverty.
Literacy and Development
As a final example, Chapter 15 of this
volume focuses on the pertinent issue of
literacy in developing countries.
Subramanian develops further the concep-
tual framework of Basu and Foster, which
takes account of the positive externality
accruing to an illiterate person if he happens
to belong to a household that contains at least
one literate person. The literate person is
believed to generate positive spillover
effects to the illiterate members of his
household. Subramanian develops some
extensions and modifications of the original
model pointing at the instrumental link
between the positive externality and equity
in the distribution of literacy. Ceteris
paribus, it is better to have the literate persons
equally distributed across all households,
so that more spillover effects take place and
more people benefit from them. Subramanian
develops a new measure of literacy, taking
into account the efficiency loss arising from
the inequality in the distribution of literacy
rates across households, similar to what is
done in the normative literature on income
inequality indices.
Subramanian illustrates his distribution-
sensitive literacy rate by measuring inter-
state disparities in the Indian literacy
attainment. Kerala and Mizoram are the
most literate states with less than 5 per cent
of the households that have no literate
members at all, whereas in Arunachal
Pradesh more than half of the households
are totally illiterate. The distribution-
sensitive measure of literacy helps in
identifying the households that should be
the prime target of an educational policy
in the presence of scarce resources: the
households without any literate members.
Moreover, the new measure can be a
fundamental building block to develop new
models of optimal educational policy for
the redress of illiteracy. Finally, the dis-
tribution-sensitive literacy measure and its
motivation based on positive externalities
can be a stepping stone for further funda-
mental inquiries of the question why some
societies show such a difference in their
distribution of literacy.
INDIAN COUNCIL OF SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH
Announcement For Social Science Ph.D. Scholars
Under the Study Grant Scheme of the ICSSR financial assistance is provided to Ph.D. scholars to collect
material from libraries/archives/data centres that are located at different cities/towns in India. Under this
scheme each scholar, whose request for financial assistance is accepted, is entitled to:
 Reimbursement of Second Class Sleeper rail fare/bus (a combination of both is also permissible) from
the place of his/her residence to the place of visit (where libraries are located) and back. A scholar
is allowed to visit two cities by round trip via shortest route.
 A fixed daily allowance @ Rs.400/- per diem to meet boarding and lodging expenses during the visit
for a maximum period of 30 days in a financial year.
 An additional amount of Rs.1,000/- to meet conveyance and other miscellaneous expenses.
Please visit our website: www.icssr.org for details of various ICSSR schemes and programmes.
The application of Study Grant in prescribed form with all necessary details is to be sent at the following
address:
 Director, NASSDOC, ICSSR, 35, Ferozeshah Road, New Delhi-110001
 Phone No. 011-23385959(Direct), 011-23074393-97 Ext-111
 Fax: 011-23383091; E-mail ID: nassdoc@icssr.orgEconomic and Political Weekly January 6, 2007 37
The merit of the volume lies in the fact
that throughout the different essays,
well-being and development are concept-
ualised as intrinsically multidimensional
with a particular focus on the fulfilment
of different positive rights. Income as the
sole measure of well-being and develop-
ment is shown to be conceptually in-
adequate. However, accurately measuring
these multidimensional concepts with
an eye to fine-tuned social policies is a
challenging task. Since Subramanian’s
anthology confronts this challenge head
on and tries to achieve a balance and re-
flective equilibrium between concepts and
measurement, it offers ample inspiration
and can stimulate further inquiry in this
direction.
Email: John.Alexander@hiw.kuleuven.be
EPW

Concepts and Measurement of Development.

https://lirias.kuleuven.be/bitstream/123456789/138275/1/EPW-Review.pdf

Concepts and Measurement of Development.

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Research Papers in Economics