On February 25^th2016, Amartya Sen, laureate of the 1998 Nobel Prize in economics, professor of Harvard University, visited School of Economics at Peking University, and delivered a keynote speech at the International Symposium on Constructing an Inclusive and Efficient International Development Aid and Cooperation System.

Firstly, Prof. Sun Qixiang, Dean of SEPKU, addressed welcoming remarks on behalf of the host. Prof. Sen expressed his delightfulness for his visit to PKU, and he also expressed his eager anticipation towards the upcoming G20 summit hosted by China. “China is great!” Sen said, “China has effectively combined its resources in education, healthcare, and other public services to serve the society”. He thought the experiences and lessons China has acquired during the three decades of development deserve the world’s attention. Prof. Sen made a systematic review of China’s reform and opening up, and specially emphasized the crucial role of education. Prof. Sen said he is confident with China’s sustainable economic growth, and the “middle-income trap” hypothesis is not appropriate to be used to explain the current Chinese economic slowdown. Finally, Prof. Sen emphasized that we should pay more concern on turning pure economic growth into social development, in which the cultural factors’ influences cannot be underestimated. In the Q & A session, Professor Sen interacted with the audience on issues about middle-income trap and south-south cooperation.

The keynote speech was followed by the ceremony of appointing Prof. Amartya Sen as the Honorary Professor of SEPKU. In the ceremony, Prof. Zhang Zheng, the Vice Dean of SEPKU, presented Prof. Sen’s academic contribution and officially awarded the certificate of appointment on behalf of the school. He said Prof. Sen is among one of the greatest philosophers at our time, and is considered the conscience of economics and an encyclopedic scholar. Prof. Sen has made great contributions in economics, morality philosophy, and political science. In view of his extraordinary achievements in the above fields, the School of Economics at Peking University decides to confer Honorary Professorship to Professor Sen.

In his early career, Prof. Sen engaged in the research of development economics, in which he put forward Lewis surplus labor theory. Later he devoted to the field of social choice, and made groundbreaking work in the voting mechanism, the social order, and the liberalism theory. Later he turned to the study of political philosophy, he made profound criticism on utilitarianism, classical liberalism and Rawlsianism. In the 1970s and early 1980s, Prof. Sen altered to research on poverty and famine and he made tremendous contributions to the study of the causes of poverty and famine index constructer. After 1990s, he raised the concept of “practical capacity”, which laid a solid philosophical foundation for the current human development theory. Nowadays, the theory has been frequently used to measure social development by many countries and international organizations. Prof. Sen paid great attention to China’s economic development in his books and made comparison between China and India on several occasions and writings. Prof. Sen praised China’s extraordinary progress in human development and its positive effect on China’s economic development.