1st April 2004
New Views of Trade and Sustainable Development: Using Sen’s Conception of Development to Re-examine the Debates
This paper is a thought piece that accepts the thinking of Amartya Sen on the subject of development and asks what that new conception of development means for the subject of trade and sustainable development. If we conceive of development as Sen does, how can the trade regime and trade policy best serve development?
The paper begins by briefly outlining the current conceptions of the trade and sustainable development relationship, deriving from it an implicit definition of development. It then explores the definition of development offered by Sen. In the concluding section, it asks what implications this definition has for our conception of the trade and sustainable development relationship, and what types of policies might best orient trade and trade liberalization to support the reconstituted objective of sustainable development.