The Theoritic Frame And Empirical Analysis Of Development As Freedom

This thesis is composed of three aspects:a retrospect on thought history of freedom and utility, theoric paradigm and positive method of "development as freedom".At first, we make a retrospect on the thought background of "development as freedom".The concept of Sen's "substantive freedom" results from the thought of Aristotle, Smith and Marx, it reflects a old tradition of academic history. Smith, John.Mill and Marx are all not only a economist, but also a philosophy, it's obvious in their literatues, so we can't have a completely distinction on freedom and market, political freedom and economic freedom. The content of thought history is seperated into two parts:(1)The philosophic foudation of "development as freedom". Not only we define and analyze the concept of "freedom" and "utility", but also we set forth the critique of Marx, Rawls, Nozick, Buchanan and Sen on utilibrium, and we have an explanation on the defendence of Harsanyi as utilibrium.(2)The Economic foudation of "Development as freedom". We analyze the process of the evolution of economics on the pespective of freedom and utility, especially we point out the differences between Smith's political economy, John.Mill's political economics and neoclassical economics. Although utilibrim has governed the mainsteamed economics(It's more obvious in the field of welfare economics), but at the same time, severe crisis exists.At second, we analyze the theoric frame of "development as freedom".To Sen, the concept of "substantive freedom" is defined by capability. Capability Approach comes from Sen's innovation on welfare economics on the 1970 age and 1980 age. Sen created new concept and frame as a substitution for traditional approach of welfare economics.Sen's study told us that if the goal of welfare economics is for human being to promote their well-being, the information set of welfarism is too limited. The another contribution of Sen is that by focusing, organizing and rationing pre-study of differrent academicians, he constructed a substitutive method(Capability Approach) for normative evalution, the new approach has a percise philosophic foundation. As theoric core, freedom in Sen's frame equals with "substantive freedom", it means human-being has capabilities for enjoying well life. Sen used this concept in different fields:unequality, famine, the standard of living and so on. But the frame of "development as freedom" has still deficiency and shortage when we deeply consider the value judgement and fact judement of it.The last but not the least, we study the possibility of emperical research on the concept of "development as freedom", and we apply HDI for calculating China's freedom and development.Emperical reaearch is necessary for any subject about human being which wants to become social sicence, it makes a dichotomy between science and metaphysics. In this field, Amartya.Sen help UNDP to invent HDP, it means a breakthrough for evaluting human development. Human development is a process of enlarging people's choices. In principle, these choice can be infinite and change over time. But at all levels of development, the three essential ones(GDP per capita, life expectancy, Knowledge) are for people to lead a long and healthy life, to acquire knowledge and to have access to resources needed for a decent standard of living.The first HDI publishes in the year of 1990, from that time, HDI is abroaded used to measure and compare the level of human development of different countries. It has become the most principal and representative index for evaluating human development. To be different from traditional index, HDI transcends the single dimention of economy, it recognizes that economy and morality, efficiency and fairness, instrument and goal are all very important.We modify HDI on the existing foundation.The emperical research in this thesis include:(1)we modify the weight of index by PCA; (2)we increase the information base of HDI on the perspective of governence and environment; (3)we make a comparation on the HDI of all the provinces of China(year 2005) by clustering analysis.