..Press Release................................ UNESCAP News Services

Date 28 March 2007
Press Release No. G/08/2007

AMARTYA SEN GIVEN UNESCAP LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD

Honoured at UNESCAP 60th anniversary commemoration in Bangkok

Bangkok (United Nations Information Services) -- Economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen was conferred an Award for Lifetime Achievement today by the Bangkok-based UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP) as part of the organization’s 60th anniversary commemoration.

Presenting the Award, UNESCAP Executive Secretary Kim Hak-Su described Professor Sen “as a citizen of the Asian and Pacific region,” and said “the ESCAP Sixtieth Anniversary Lifetime Achievement Award is a symbol of our immense pride that a son of our region has risen to be an eminent citizen of the world.”

Born in Santiniketan, India, in 1933, Professor Sen was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998, the only Asian to date to have been so honoured, for his contributions to welfare economics. He is currently the Lamont University Professor, and Professor of Economics and Philosophy, at Harvard University, and was until recently the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.

In the citation accompanying the award, UNESCAP notes that Professor Sen’s writings, on social choice, welfare distribution, poverty, famines, democracy, individual freedom and human identify, “have extended the frontiers of contemporary thinking on some of the most pressing issues” facing the region. “Professor Sen’s seminal contributions have revolutionized contemporary thinking and profoundly affected the … policies of the United Nations and countries across the globe,” it states.

Preceding the presentation of the award, Professor Sen gave a special lecture to United Nations staff on the subject of “Asian Immensities.” Speaking to a packed conference hall, Professor Sen catalogued some of the contributions made by Asian civilizations to the world throughout the centuries, and many of the different ways in which Asians have learned from each other.

“We have reason to be proud of what we Asians have been able to do for ourselves and for world civilization,” he said. “But there is a lot to do still. The celebration of the past achievements of Asia’s parliamentary inclinations as well as its vast immensities is also a good moment to think of the future. I would like to be able to say: the best is yet come!”

The commemoration of UNESCAP’s 60th anniversary included a video message from UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, speeches by Her Royal Highness Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn and the Thai Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont, a parade of flags of UNESCAP member states, a special dance performance portraying changes in the region over the past six decades, and singing by all heads of UN agencies based in Bangkok and ESCAP staff members. (For details please find from our website at http://www.unescap.org/unis/press/2007/mar/g09.asp.)