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179 Afro-Colombian Welfare: An Application of Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach Using Multiple Indicators Multiple Causes Modeling (MIMIC) PaulaA.Lezama A martya Sen’s Capability Approach has emerged as an alternative framework to long-established economical approaches that seek to analyze individual welfare, poverty and human development from narrow monetary perspectives (Kuklys 2005; Clark 2005). The Capability Approach identifies three elements—functionings, capabilities,and agency—to analyze individual welfare. Functionings represent the achieved welfare of an individual: what a person manages to be or do in the different dimensions of human life. These “beings” and “doings” vary in a wide range of aspects, from being adequately nourished and in good health to more complex achievements like having self-confidence or walking without shame. Capabilities express the set of available functionings an individual has to choose from. They are the set of choices people have, or the freedom to choose the life they want (Sen 1985b, 1999). In turn, agency is the human capacity to determine one’s life. It is by the free exercise of individual agency that people achieve valuable capabilities (welfare). In this context, development policy must be aimed to (re)create the institutional and social arrangements to guarantee this free exercise. By using Sen’s approach, I thus accept the conceptual premise that human welfare is more about substantive freedoms enjoyed across multiple dimensions (valuable capabilities), and less about how much income a person has. Furthermore, I support the argument that cumulative development can best be achieved by expanding the range of individual freedoms, as they have instrumental Paula A. Lezama 180 value to achieving economic development, but most importantly, these freedoms have an intrinsic value in fostering human well-being. Fromthisstandpoint,thisresearchconceptualizeshumanwelfareastheachievement of valuable capabilities, and it seeks to analyze it in comparative perspective. Specifically, it seeks to understand welfare differences between Afro-Colombians and non-Afro-Colombians in two dimensions, namely “knowledge” and “shelter” capabilities. Its aim is to understand how ethnic and racial characteristics affect the achievement of welfare for individual members of the Afro-Colombian population vis-à-vis non-Afro-Colombians in the analyzed dimensions, beyond income levels or consumption patterns. The two dimensions of human welfare analyzed here were chosenforboththeirintrinsicandinstrumentalrelevance.The“knowledgecapability,” whichrepresentstheindividualpossibilitytochoosethelevelofknowledgeandeducation a person wants and has reason to value, is translated into the functioning space (realizedwelfare)asyearsofeducationandtrainingactivities.Inturn,theseareclosely linked to processes of social mobility, human capital accumulation, and economic growth. On the other hand, “being properly sheltered,” people’s opportunity to chose their preferred shelter conditions, is an intrinsic aspect of human development that translatesintothefunctioningspaceashavingenoughspace,accesstodrinkingwater, and public-services infrastructure. These are also instrumental factors contributing tohealthandeducationaloutcomes.Livinginanovercrowdedenvironment,alackof drinkingwater,andunsafeconstructionmaterialsarefactorshighlycorrelatedwitha number of health deficiencies and low academic performance.1 This paper also seeks to contribute to the ongoing discussion about quantitative methods in the social sciences suitable to operationalize Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach. By implementing a Multiple Indicators Multiple Causes (MIMIC) model to assess capabilities in two dimensions of human welfare, “knowledge” and “being adequately sheltered,” as latent constructs (Jöreskog and Goldberger 1975), this research seeks to develop a quantitative application of the Capability Approach. The aim of MIMIC is to capture how a set of exogenous variables (e.g., ethnicity, gender, or being poor) expand or contract a given capability dimension (e.g., “knowledge”), whichisassessedasanunobservedvariable.Inturn,thatgivencapabilitydetermines specific outcomes or individual functioning achievements (e.g., achieved years of education).Theseindividualfunctioningachievementsarethesetofindicatorsofthe given latent construct. Although this technique does not allow the quantification of a capability dimension as such, it does allow the determination of what and how they are influenced, and in turn, which level of individual welfare a person is able to secure giventhefreedomorcapabilityheorsheenjoyedwhenchoosing.Accordingly,lowerfunctioningachievementisassociatedwithlowercapabilityorlessfreedom ,whichin A fro -C o lo mb ia n W e lfa re 181 turniscausedbytheinteractionoffactorssuchasage,gender,race,andlocation.The contraryalsoholdstrue.Thismethodologythusallowstheidentificationoftheimpact of those factors over the knowledge and shelter capabilities, and in turn, how these impactsaretranslatedintoachievedwelfareofanindividualinthespecificdimension. The study uses the 2003 Quality of Life Survey (ECV 2003 in Spanish)2 implemented by the National Department of Statistics in Colombia. The QLS 2003 was a survey designed to assess the socioeconomic conditions of the Colombian population with a sample of 24,090 households and 85,145 individuals, representative at the national level. Calculations were performed using the Statistical Analysis System (SAS), and its procedure Covariance Analysis of Linear Structural Equation (CALIS). Historically,Afro-Colombianshavebeenmarginalizedfromthebenefitsofmodernityanddemocracy .Sociallyexcluded,theyhavetheworstlivingconditionsincomparative terms to the rest of the population (Arocha 1998; Urrea et al. 2005...

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