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During the military regime in Brazil (1964–1985), enrollment ratios in primary education grew substantially in the first decade under dictatorship, but stagnated in the mid-1970s. This paper shows that education spending might depend on the levels of centralisation in tax matters. Using panel data regressions and qualitative evidence, we argue that a massive big push industrialisation programme increased the pressure on external accounts, leading the government to intensify an export incentive policy based on tax subsidies that decreased the income of subnational governments. As a result, the capacity of funding mass education was compromised in the second half of the 1970s.
The capability approach is a versatile framework rooted on issues of justice and multidimensional assessment of quality of life developed in the 1980s as an alternative approach to prevailing mainstream development ideas focused narrowly on economic development. Most closely associated with the work of Amartya Sen, it has become of great interest to development scholars from a variety of different disciplines. Much has already been done exploring the conceptual foundations of the capability approach and discussing Sen's contribution to the field, but few books have explored the links between social choice (another field with rich contributions by Sen) and human development issues. Featuring many of the world's leading experts on social choice theory and capability indicators, Social Choice, Agency, Inclusiveness and Capabilities combines these interrelated themes into one volume and fully explores the relevance of social choice to human development.
The main objective of this chapter is to show how informational pluralism can be used within Sen’s social choice framework (SSC). In order to tackle this issue, two steps are necessary. First, it is important to spell out the ‘generalizability’ assumption behind Sen’s principle of working with broad informational spaces. Second, we need to work out a method to make sense of the need to conciliate different informational spaces. By doing so, several features and issues of the capability approach can be seen as part of a systematic story. Thus, this chapter is divided into four parts. The first part explores the generalizability issue behind the capability approach. The second provides a brief characterization of Sen’s social choice approach. The third part demonstrates how it can be used through what can be named ‘generalizability tables’. Finally, the chapter briefly concludes with some suggestions for future work.
This chapter provides an overview of the books main issues and how they constitute a key narrative for understanding the links between Amartya Sens social choice theory (SCT) and other elements of his capability approach. It invites its readers to a long interdisciplinary journey, from an acknowledgement of the SCT features in Sen’s work to rich analytical categories that expand the core of SCT towards new forms of social theorizing. More specifically, it reviews the main features of Sen’s SCT and discusses a wide range of issues related to collective choices and individual values, such as those of consensus building, institutional change, identity perceptions, inclusiveness, notions of agency, the role of moral sentiments and emotions in shaping social choice, an ethics of sufficiency versus an ethics of optimal social capability, the influence of psychological aspects on individuals’ choices and the role of social structures in shaping people’s social priorities. It covers a wide range of empirical cases, and advances a proposal for a broader notion of social choice that can be richer, more interdisciplinary and more useful to human development theory and policies.