About
Erik Thorbecke is H. E. Babcock Professor of Economics, Emeritus, Graduate School and International Professor at Cornell University.
Professor Thorbecke is also former Director of the Program on Comparative Economic Development at Cornell, and he is a longstanding member of the Advisory Board for the Cornell Institute for African Development. His past positions include chairman of the Department of Economics at Cornell, a professorship at Iowa State University, and associate assistant administrator for program policy at the Agency for International Development. He was awarded an honorary doctorate degree by the University of Ghent in 1981.
He has made contributions in the areas of economic and agricultural development, the measurement and analysis of poverty and malnutrition, the Social Accounting Matrix and general equilibrium modeling, and international economic policy. The Foster-Greer-Thorbecke poverty measure (Econometrica, 1984) that he developed (with James Foster and Joel Greer) has been adopted as the standard poverty measure by the World Bank and many UN agencies and is widely used by researchers doing empirical work on poverty. A variant of the FGT was adopted by the Mexican government and used to allocate federal government funds to educational, health and nutrition programs benefiting the poor.
He is the author or co-author of more than twenty-five books and over one hundred fifty articles.
Erik Thorbecke 