Human rights: a new form of capital?

In the forum held in the CAF headquarters in Caracas, coordinated by the Vice Presidency of Social and Environmental Development, the World Bank economist and expert on sustainable development and human rights, among other aspects, Alfredo Sfeir-Younis, put forward the possibility of defining human rights as a new form of capital.

Sfeir-Younis said that market mechanisms were not sufficient to achieve economic efficiency and that, in this context, human rights were essential for the existence of a market economy in democracy.

The conceptualizations of physical capital, financial capital, human capital, cultural capital, institutional capital and natural capital have to be accompanied by the capital of human rights, which is directly related to the eradication of poverty.

The expert said that economic arguments had to be created in the theory of economic welfare to explain why human rights were transcendental to the theoretical and practical existence of the market economy, promoting a new way of seeing human rights not as affirmative obligations but as an intrinsic element of economic development, and of the eradication of poverty. To do this, he proposes that the theory of welfare should consider human rights as a new form of capital, as a new form of initial productive stock that affects the situation and productivity of all forms of capital. This is today’s key debate, Sfeir-Younis concluded.