Social safety nets needed for Asian poor — Amartya

Sen, who was awarded the Nobel Prize last year for his extensive work in welfare economics, was speaking at a forum here organized by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies and the Japan Centre for International Exchange.

“If that five or 10 per cent decline (in economic growth) is not shared evenly, and it is heaped instead largely on the poorest part of the population, then that group may have very little income left, no matter what the overall growth performance may have been in the past.”

“This is why… social arrangements for safety nets are an integral part of development itself,” added Sen.

He said “the newly dispossessed did not have the hearing they needed, in say, Indonesia or Korea” and “not surprisingly, democracy became a major issue precisely at a time of crisis”.

“Economic incentives, important as they are, are no substitute for political incentives,” he said, adding “the absence of an adequate system of political incentives cannot be filled by the operation of economic inducement.”