Development as Freedom (8 page)

In presenting empirical studies in this work, I shall have the occasion to discuss a number of instrumental freedoms that contribute, directly or indirectly, to the overall freedom people have to live the way they would like to live. The diversities of the instruments involved are quite extensive. However, it may be convenient to identify five distinct types of freedom that may be particularly worth emphasizing in this instrumental perspective. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it may help to focus on some particular policy issues that demand special attention at this time.

In particular, I shall consider the following types of instrumental freedoms: (1)
political freedoms
, (2)
economic facilities
, (3)
social opportunities
, (4)
transparency guarantees
and (5)
protective security
. These instrumental freedoms tend to contribute to the general capability of a person to live more freely, but they also serve to complement one another. While development analysis must, on the one hand, be concerned with the objectives and aims that make these instrumental freedoms consequentially important, it must also take note of the empirical linkages that tie the distinct types of freedom
together
, strengthening their joint importance. Indeed, these connections are central to a fuller understanding of the instrumental role of freedom. The claim that freedom is not only the primary object of development but also its principal means relates particularly to these linkages.

Let me comment a little on each of these instrumental freedoms.
Political freedoms
, broadly conceived (including what are called civil rights), refer to the opportunities that people have to determine who should govern and on what principles, and also include the possibility to scrutinize and criticize authorities, to have freedom of political expression and an uncensored press, to enjoy the freedom to choose between different political parties, and so on. They include the political entitlements associated with democracies in the broadest sense (encompassing opportunities of political dialogue, dissent and critique as well as voting rights and participatory selection of legislators and executives).

Economic facilities
refer to the opportunities that individuals
respectively enjoy to utilize economic resources for the purpose of consumption, or production, or exchange. The economic entitlements that a person has will depend on the resources owned or available for use as well as on conditions of exchange, such as relative prices and the working of the markets. Insofar as the process of economic development increases the income and wealth of a country, they are reflected in corresponding enhancement of economic entitlements of the population. It should be obvious that in the relation between national income and wealth, on the one hand, and the economic entitlements of individuals (or families), on the other, distributional considerations are important, in addition to aggregative ones. How the additional incomes generated are distributed will clearly make a difference.

The availability and access to finance can be a crucial influence on the economic entitlements that economic agents are practically able to secure. This applies all the way from large enterprises (in which hundreds of thousands of people may work) to tiny establishments that are run on micro credit. A credit crunch, for example, can severely affect the economic entitlements that rely on such credit.

Social opportunities
refer to the arrangements that society makes for education, health care and so on, which influence the individual’s substantive freedom to live better. These facilities are important not only for the conduct of private lives (such as living a healthy life and avoiding preventable morbidity and premature mortality), but also for more effective participation in economic and political activities. For example, illiteracy can be a major barrier to participation in economic activities that require production according to specification or demand strict quality control (as globalized trade increasingly does). Similarly, political participation may be hindered by the inability to read newspapers or to communicate in writing with others involved in political activities.

I turn now to the fourth category. In social interactions, individuals deal with one another on the basis of some presumption of what they are being offered and what they can expect to get. In this sense, the society operates on some basic presumption of trust.
Transparency guarantees
deal with the need for openness that people can expect: the freedom to deal with one another under guarantees of disclosure and lucidity. When that trust is seriously violated, the
lives of many people—both direct parties and third parties—may be adversely affected by the lack of openness. Transparency guarantees (including the right to disclosure) can thus be an important category of instrumental freedom. These guarantees have a clear instrumental role in preventing corruption, financial irresponsibility and underhand dealings.

Finally, no matter how well an economic system operates, some people can be typically on the verge of vulnerability and can actually succumb to great deprivation as a result of material changes that adversely affect their lives.
Protective security
is needed to provide a social safety net for preventing the affected population from being reduced to abject misery, and in some cases even starvation and death. The domain of protective security includes
fixed
institutional arrangements such as unemployment benefits and statutory income supplements to the indigent as well as ad hoc arrangements such as famine relief or emergency public employment to generate income for destitutes.

These instrumental freedoms directly enhance the capabilities of people, but they also supplement one another, and can furthermore reinforce one another. These interlinkages are particularly important to seize in considering development policies.

The fact that the entitlement to economic transactions tends to be typically a great engine of economic growth has been widely accepted. But many other connections remain underrecognized, and they have to be seized more fully in policy analysis. Economic growth can help not only in raising private incomes but also in making it possible for the state to finance social insurance and active public intervention. Thus the contribution of economic growth has to be judged not merely by the increase in private incomes, but also by the expansion of social services (including, in many cases, social safety nets) that economic growth may make possible.
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Similarly, the creation of social opportunities, through such services as public education, health care, and the development of a free and energetic press, can contribute both to economic development and to significant reductions in mortality rates. Reduction of mortality
rates, in turn, can help to reduce birth rates, reinforcing the influence of basic education—especially female literacy and schooling—on fertility behavior.

The pioneering example of enhancing economic growth through social opportunity, especially in basic education, is of course Japan. It is sometimes forgotten that Japan had a higher rate of literacy than Europe had even at the time of the Meiji restoration in the mid-nineteenth century, when industrialization had not yet occurred there but had gone on for many decades in Europe. Japan’s economic development was clearly much helped by the human resource development related to the social opportunities that were generated. The so-called East Asian miracle involving other countries in East Asia was, to a great extent, based on similar causal connections.
⁴

This approach goes against—and to a great extent undermines—the belief that has been so dominant in many policy circles that “human development” (as the process of expanding education, health care and other conditions of human life is often called) is really a kind of luxury that only richer countries can afford. Perhaps the most important impact of the type of success that the East Asian economies, beginning with Japan, have had is the total undermining of that implicit prejudice. These economies went comparatively early for massive expansion of education, and later also of health care, and this they did, in many cases,
before
they broke the restraints of general poverty. And they have reaped as they have sown. Indeed, as Hiromitsu Ishi has pointed out, the priority to human resource development applies particularly to the early history of Japanese economic development, beginning with the Meiji era (1868–1911), and that focus has not intensified with economic affluence as Japan has grown richer and much more opulent.
⁵

The central role of individual freedoms in the process of development makes it particularly important to examine their determinants. Substantial attention has to be paid to the social influences, including state actions, that help to determine the nature and reach of individual freedoms. Social arrangements may be decisively important in securing and expanding the freedom of the individual. Individual
freedoms are influenced, on one side, by the social safeguarding of liberties, tolerance, and the possibility of exchange and transactions. They are also influenced, on the other side, by substantive public support in the provision of those facilities (such as basic health care or essential education) that are crucial for the formation and use of human capabilities. There is need to pay attention to both types of determinants of individual freedoms.

The contrast between India and China has some illustrative importance in this context. The governments of both China and India have been making efforts for some time now (China from 1979 and India from 1991) to move toward a more open, internationally active, market-oriented economy. While Indian efforts have slowly met with some success, the kind of massive results that China has seen has failed to occur in India. An important factor in this contrast lies in the fact that from the standpoint of social preparedness, China is a great deal ahead of India in being able to make use of the market economy.
⁶
While pre-reform China was deeply skeptical of markets, it was not skeptical of basic education and widely shared health care. When China turned to marketization in 1979, it already had a highly literate people, especially the young, with good schooling facilities across the bulk of the country. In this respect, China was not very far from the basic educational situation in South Korea or Taiwan, where too an educated population had played a major role in seizing the economic opportunities offered by a supportive market system. In contrast, India had a half-illiterate adult population when it turned to marketization in 1991, and the situation is not much improved today.

The health conditions in China were also much better than in India because of the social commitment of the pre-reform regime to health care as well as education. Oddly enough, that commitment, while totally unrelated to its helpful role in market-oriented economic growth, created social opportunities that could be brought into dynamic use after the country moved toward marketization. The social backwardness of India, with its elitist concentration on higher education and massive negligence of school education, and its substantial neglect of basic health care, left that country poorly prepared for a widely shared economic expansion. The contrast between India and China does, of course, have many other aspects (including the
differences in their respective political systems, and the much greater variation
within
India of social opportunities such as literacy and health care); these issues will be addressed later. But the relevance of the radically different levels of social preparedness in China and India for widespread market-oriented development is worth noting even at this preliminary stage of the analysis.

It must, however, also be noted that there are real handicaps that China experiences compared with India because it lacks democratic freedoms. This is particularly so when it comes to flexibility of economic policy and the responsiveness of public action to social crisis and unforeseen disasters. The most prominent contrast lies perhaps in the fact that China has had what is almost certainly the largest recorded famine in history (when thirty million people died in the famine that followed the failure of the Great Leap Forward in 1958–1961), whereas India has not had a famine since independence in 1947. When things go well, the protective power of democracy may be less missed, but dangers can lie round the corner (as indeed the recent experiences of some of the East Asian and Southeast Asian economies bring out). This issue too will have to be discussed more fully later on in this book.

There are very many different interconnections between distinct instrumental freedoms. Their respective roles and their specific influences on one another are important aspects of the process of development. In the chapters to follow, there will be opportunities to discuss a number of these interconnections and their extensive reach. However, to illustrate how these interconnections work, let me here go a little into the diverse influences on longevity and life expectancy at birth—capabilities that people value almost universally.

The impact of social arrangements on the freedom to survive can be very strong and may be influenced by quite different instrumental connections. The point is sometimes made that this is not a separate consideration from economic growth (in the form of raising the level of per capita income) since there is a close relation between income per head and longevity. Indeed, it has been argued that it is a mistake to worry about the discord between income achievements and
survival chances, since—in general—the statistical connection between them is observed to be quite close. As a point about intercountry statistical connections, seen in isolation, this is indeed correct, but this statistical relation needs further scrutiny before it can be seen as a convincing ground for dismissing the relevance of social arrangements (going beyond income-based opulence).