The East Asian miracle: Economic growth and public policy: By the World Bank. (New York: Oxford University Press for the World Bank, 1993. 389 pp. $19.95, paper.)

This paper aims to present a theoretical survey of the capability approach in an interdisciplinary and accessible way. It focuses on the main conceptual and theoretical aspects of the capability approach, as developed by Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, and others. The capability approach is a broad normative framework for the evaluation and assessment of individual well‐being and social arrangements, the design of policies, and proposals about social change in society. Its main characteristics are its highly interdisciplinary character, and the focus on the plural or multidimensional aspects of well‐being. The approach highlights the difference between means and ends, and between substantive freedoms (capabilities) and outcomes (achieved functionings).

The Capability Approach: a theoretical survey

The asset vulnerability framework: Reassessing urban poverty reduction strategies

Environmental Entitlements: Dynamics and Institutions in Community-Based Natural Resource Management

One of the most important developments over the past three decades has been the spread of liberal economic ideas and policies throughout the world. These policies have affected the lives of millions of people, yet our most sophisticated political economy models do not adequately capture influences on these policy choices. Evidence suggests that the adoption of liberal economic practices is highly clustered both temporally and spatially. We hypothesize that this clustering might be due to processes of policy diffusion. We think of diffusion as resulting from one of two broad sets of forces: one in which mounting adoptions of a policy alter the benefits of adopting for others and another in which adoptions provide policy relevant information about the benefits of adopting. We develop arguments within these broad classes of mechanisms, construct appropriate measures of the relevant concepts, and test their effects on liberalization and restriction of the current account, the capital account, and the exchange rate regime. Our findings suggest that domestic models of foreign economic policy making are insufficient. The evidence shows that policy transitions are influenced by international economic competition as well as the policies of a country's sociocultural peers. We interpret the latter influence as a form of channeled learning reflecting governments' search for appropriate models for economic policy.

/pdf/the-globalization-of-liberalization-policy-diffusion-in-the-3182u08iz4.pdf

The Globalization of Liberalization: Policy Diffusion in the International Political Economy

https://www.gsid.nagoya-u.ac.jp/sotsubo/gore.pdf

The Rise and Fall of the Washington Consensus as a Paradigm for Developing Countries

The globalization of economic relations is posing numerous new challenges to policy-makers at national and international levels. This book is based on the view that there is need for fresh approaches to social issues that frame analysis and policy design in a way which takes account of globalization, and which does not separate the social from the economic. It explores the value of understanding poverty, deprivation and inequality in terms of the social exclusion of individuals and groups from sources of livelihood and from citizenship rights. It also examines both the rhetoric and the reality of social exclusion and possible policy responses.

Social exclusion: Rhetoric, reality, responses

This article examines the conceptual basis and analytical deployment of Sen's entitlement analysis in ethics and economics, focusing on the rules of entitlement. Sen specifies the rules of entitlement in different ways in his work, ignores how legal rules work in practice and downplays the way in which socially enforced moral rules constrain and enable entitlement. The appropriateness of Sen's approach for the analysis of hunger and famine and for the philosophical arguments which Sen makes are assessed, and an alternative view of the rules of entitlement is suggested. This draws in particular on the literature on the moral economy of provisioning.

Entitlement relations and ‘unruly’ social practices: A comment on the work of Amartya Sen

This paper argues that Sen's capability approach requires that judgements about the relative goodness of states of affairs must be based exclusively on ‘properties’ of individuals. Functionings and capabilities are seen, like utility and opulence, as objects of value which individuals have—achieved or attainable effects which are disembedded from the institutional contexts of human activity. If such contexts are intrinsically valuable for individual well-being, as some ‘communitarians’ argue, the capability approach is inappropriate for assessing social justice, societal well-being and development, and inequalities in individual well-being across cultures or in multicultural societies. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Irreducibly social goods and the informational basis of Amartya Sen's capability approach

Part One Common regional policy objectives 1. Regional, imbalance as a policy problem 2. Growth, income distribution and spatial inequality Part Two Rival regional planning strategies 3. Urban-industrial growth pole strategies and the diffusion of modernization 4. Some anti-theses: polarization and the development of underdevelopment 5. Neo-populist regional development strategies Part Three The poverty of the spatial sepratist theme 6. Space and explanation in regional development theory 7. The limits of spacial policy and territorial regional planning Conclusion The state, development and regional planning practice

Charles Gore

Papers

The Rise and Fall of the Washington Consensus as a Paradigm for Developing Countries

Social exclusion: Rhetoric, reality, responses

Entitlement relations and ‘unruly’ social practices: A comment on the work of Amartya Sen

Irreducibly social goods and the informational basis of Amartya Sen's capability approach

Regions in Question : Space, Development Theory and Regional Policy