Economic Development Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words - 2

Economic Development - Essay Example He challenges traditional economic theories to justify a more aggressive, humane and generous funding formula to benefit the worlds poorest nations. As rightly quoted in his book Development as Freedom; Freedom is both constitutive of development and instrumental to it. Instrumental freedoms include political freedom, economic facilities, social opportunities, transparency, and security, which are all different but inter-connected. Economic needs are considered by some to be more important than political freedoms, but the opposition is, Sen argues, mostly illusory. He also reminds us that democracy, as well as being an end in itself, plays an instrumental role in giving people a voice and a constructive role in shaping values and norms. "Political rights, including freedom of expression and discussion, are not only pivotal in inducing social responses to economic needs, they are also central to the conceptualization of economic needs themselves." (Amartya 2001) Amartya Sen views the ultimate goal of development as maximising people’s freedom to lead the lives they wish within the context of society. Political freedom and civil rights have importance of their own. Their value to the society does not have to be indirectly established in terms of their contribution to economic growth or other such economic or social achievements. Politically unfree citizens are deficient in freedom even if they happen to enjoy a very high level of income. Freedoms can be of many different kinds. In Development as Freedom, he tried to make the task more manageable by classifying diverse freedoms into five different categories, namely: economic empowerment, political freedoms, social opportunities, protective security and transparency guarantees, There is nothing particularly sacrosanct about this classification, but it does cover the ground. Political freedoms and transparency guarantee particularly in the form