Paper Review 01: Stephen Devereux (2001)

"Students from developed economies understand poverty, while students from developing economies feel poverty".

You will understand this quote more as you read.

Amartya Sen's take on famine in his book 'Poverty and Famines: Entitlement and Deprivation' created havoc among development and socialist economists during the 1981. It was indeed an innovative and holistic approach and to a great extent challenged the traditional approach of looking at famines.

His book is cited till date, 10407 times (Google Scholar) and this will continue to increase as there is more exposure to understand and feeling of poverty.

Often in research, there is always limitations and as a noble approach, a researcher must acknowledge that and prepare for criticism. Often what distinguishes constructive criticism from ridicule is the analysis, the wording, the approach and to what extent the writer grabs the readers attention. Devereux (2001) has done a splendid job in captivating all of the requirements making it one of the "must reads" if you are pursuing Development Economics.

There is always two side of the coin and before you disown Devereux or me for criticizing Sen, I would suggest you skim read Sen's work. Reading always helps; you will be better at understanding today than yesterday.

There is enormous literature on Sen's approach and understanding of poverty and famines. Hence, I will keep the strand of study limited but specific.

As quoted by Devereux,

"Entitlements have been defined by Sen (1984, p. 497) as “the set of alternative commodity bundles that a person can command in a society using the totality of rights and opportunities that he or she faces”. It should be noted immediately that this is a descriptive rather than a normative concept; entitlements derive from legal rights rather than morality or human rights. Sen (1981, p. 166) concludes Poverty and Famines with this famous observation: “The law stands between food availability and food entitlement. Starvation deaths can re?flect legality with a vengeance”. There is clearly something odd—at best uncomfortable, at worst “defective”—with an analytical approach that appropriates a normative term like “entitlement” and strips it of all ethical connotations"

Take a moment to absorb his wordings and try to understand the depth of his question.

Sen put forth that when individuals/households are stripped off their "entitlements"; they are not entitled to food but are entitled to starve. And if you have by now grasped Devereux words, you will soon understand that entitlements in no way reflect the right to food.

Sen identifies the following four entitlements: “production-based entitlement” (growing food), “trade-based entitlement” (buying food), “own labor entitlement” (working for food) and “inheritance and transfer entitlement” (being given food by others). Individuals face starvation if their full entitlement set does not provide them with adequate food for subsistence. Famine scales this up: occupationally or geographically related groups of people face famine if they simultaneously experience catastrophic declines in their entitlements.

The beauty of literature in Economics is that you will often find rebuttals. You are bound to find for Sen's framework too. The entitlement approach has been subjected to critical scrutiny many times before, ranging from a favourable “assessment” by Osmani (1995), to less favourable “reassessment” by de Waal (1990), “critique” by Nolan (1993), even “refutation” by Bowbrick (1986) and dismissal as a theoretical “failure” by Rangasami (1985) and Fine (1997).

Sen chooses Food Availability Decline (FAD) to contrast his theory of entitlement approach.

Devereux quotes,

"The danger is that setting up ‘FAD’ as a hypothesis to be refuted by the entitlement approach places the latter in an equivalent status, as a theoretical proposition requiring theoretical justi?fication and empirical veri?fication. It does seem that Sen is trying to have it both ways, by presenting the entitlement approach as a generic framework for analysing famine processes but then deploying the approach to refute a theory of famine causation with which he profoundly disagrees"

What Devereux is saying that Sen applauds his entitlement approach and ridicules FAD, with the framework that ALL famines occur due to fall in entitlements and some can continue to happen even when there is adequate food supply.

Devereux continues to show how both his theory are subject to "attacks" analytically and empirically. I would suggest everyone who has read so far to read this section of Devereux. Because I focus on short reviews, I do not think empirical reviews can ever limited to a few words.

What makes Sen a distinguished scholar is his acknowledgement of limitations in his entitlement approach. As such:

• there can be ambiguities in the speci?fication of entitlements” (Sen, 1981, pp. 48–49)
• while entitlement relations concentrate on rights within the given legal structure in that society, some transfers involve violations of these rights, such as looting or brigandage” (Sen, 1981, p. 49).
• people’s actual food consumption may fall below their entitlements for a variety of other reasons, such as ignorance, ? fixed food habits, or apathy” (Sen, 1981, p. 50).
• the entitlement approach focuses on starvation, which has to be distinguished from famine mortality, since many of the famine deaths—in some case most of them—are caused by epidemics” (Sen, 1981, p. 50). 

I'd like to quote Sen here, just to see how many of you understand or feel poverty,

"people’s actual food consumption may fall below their entitlements for a variety of other reasons, such as ignorance, ? fixed food habits, or apathy … Also, people sometimes choose to starve rather than sell their productive Sen’s Entitlement Approach 249 assets, and this can be accommodated in the entitlement approach using a relatively long-run formulation (taking note of future entitlements)"

You have no idea of the severity of poverty till you feel what they feel. These extremely poor people are willing to go hungry at the expense of death.

I'll end here today and leave the rest of the knowledge to be soaked up by you. Let me know if you understood or felt poverty.