Erick Thorbecke

Autor

Is the H.E. Babcock Professor of Economics and Food Economics Emeritus and former Director of the Program on Comparative Economic Development at Cornell University. He is presently Graduate School Professor. 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 (Econométrica, 1984) has been adopted as the standard poverty measure by the World Bank and practically all UN agencies and is used almost universally by researchers doing empirical work on poverty. At one time the FGT measure (the squared poverty gap) was used to allocate inter-regionally funds from the Federal Government in Mexico for educational, health and nutritional programs benefiting the poor. In the last two years Thorbecke has assisted CONEVAL in the formulation of a multidimensional poverty measure that could be used and implemented in allocating funds to municipalities. He is the author or co-author of about 25 books and 200 articles. He has been an economic adviser to numerous U.S. and international agencies, and foreign governments, including USAID, the Food and Agricultural Organization, the International Labor Organization, the World Bank, the OECD Development Center and uNU-WIDER. Professor Cornell University.

et17@cornell.edu