The following is excerpted from a 3 October 2012 speech by DG Pascal Lamy of the World Trade Organization.
Director-General Pascal Lamy, at the opening of the academic year of the Geneva Graduate Institute with Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen on 3 October 2012, said: “In his work Development as Freedom, Prof. Sen defines development as a process that expands human freedom and removes those ‘unfreedoms’ that leave people with little choice and few opportunities. International trade is recognized as a tool for generating opportunities for development. In this same spirit, the WTO does not advocate open trade for its own sake, but as a means for ‘raising standards of living, ensuring full employment and a large and steadily growing volume of real income and effective demand’.”
This speech is available in its entirety at:
http://www.wto.org/english/news_e/sppl_e/sppl251_e.htm