The dominant approach to economic policy has so far failed to adequately address the pressing challenges the world faces today - extreme poverty, widespread joblessness and precarious employment, burgeoning inequality, and large scale environmental threats. This message was brought home forcibly by the 2008 global economic crisis.

This new book shows how human rights have the potential to transform economic thinking and policy-making with far-reaching consequences for social justice. The authors make the case for a new normative and analytical framework, based not upon narrow goals such as the growth of gross domestic product, but on a broader range of objectives which have the potential to increase the substantive freedoms and choices people enjoy in the course of their lives.