October 14, 1998
Correspondent Report (Voice of America)
By Challiss McDonough
Washington, DC, USA

Indian economist Amartya Sen has spent his career studying poverty, famine, and the distribution of wealth in a society. The field is known as welfare or development economics, and no one who works in it has ever won a Nobel prize before. He gained recognition for his studies of the 1974 famine in Bangladesh. His work has challenged the common view that food shortage is the major cause of famine.

Amartya Sen: "It is really economics dealing with assessment of how well things are going for the members of the society. That is the central thing about welfare economics. That is, if you want to say that things have turned out to be terribly bad in some situation, then to explain why that evaluation, why that judgment, why that assessment would be appropriate."

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences says Sen has had a particular interest in the most impoverished members of a society. It says by combining tools from economics and philosophy, Shri Sen restored an ethical dimension to the discussion of vital economic problems.

Amartya Sen: "I am pleased, quite aside from my getting the prize, which obviously is personally pleasing. I am also pleased that the subject, which I take very seriously, is getting some recognition. In some ways one even feels sad that one could not share it with everyone else who had worked in this area."

Sen's work on poverty and famine stands in marked contrast to last year's nobel laureates, who were honored for their work on valuing risky derivatives investments, such as stock options. Last month, their hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Management, nearly collapsed before receiving a three-point-six-billion-dollar bailout.