Eco reforms must accompany social investment: Sen

Bangkok, Mar 28: The process of economic reforms needs to be accompanied by social investment so that the poor can benefit from liberalisation, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen said here today.

''The reform process itself does not harm poverty,'' the 1998 Nobel Economics winner said before receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award from Bangkok-based UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP).

Addressing UN officials and experts here, Mr Sen pointed out that Asia's economic miracle is ''related to the working of many other institutions along with the market.'' In this context, he cited the impressive achievement of Japan in the development of human capital through emphasis on education and skill formation early in the 20th century.

''In India, school education had lagged and is only now catching up, but the country's own economic expansion has been fed by its success in technical higher education, and the capability expansion resulting from this has been fruitfully used in information technology, pharmaceuticals, and other specialised sectors of modern production,'' he added.

Similarly, China's rapid progress in life expectancy in the pre-reform period through social intervention at a time when the country was still very poor, has much to teach India, he opined.

The sharing of the fruits of growth remains very unequal in India, he added attributing this to unequal opportunities.

Conferred for the first time, the lifetime award honours Professor Sen's seminal contribution in understanding some of the fundamental issues and problems in the theory of social choice, welfare distribution, poverty, famines, democracy, individual freedom and human identity, said UNESCAP Chief Kim Hak Su.

UNI