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Job Title: Research Associate Contact Details: The Elliott School of International Affairs, The George Washington University, 1957 E Street, NW Suite 502, Washington, D.C. 20052, USA james.foster@qeh.ox.ac.uk |
Biography
James Foster is Professor of Economics and International Affairs at The Elliott School of International Affairs at The George Washington University. Professor Foster received his Ph.D. in economics from Cornell University where he received the Selma Fine Goldsmith Award for his dissertation. He held positions at the Krannert School of Management at Purdue University and Department of Economics at Vanderbilt before joining the Elliott School. He has been a visiting professor at the London School of Economics, Cornell, Essex, Oxford, Harvard, and the University of the Americas in Puebla, Mexico. He received the Unilever Fellowship (UK) and the Robert Wood Johnson Investigator Award in Health Policy, and holds a Doctorate Honoris Causa, from Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Hidalgo (Mexico).
Professor Foster’s research focuses on welfare economics — using economic tools to evaluate the well-being of people. His joint 1984 Econometrica paper is one of the most cited papers on poverty; it introduced the FGT Index, which has been used in thousands of studies and was the basis for targeting the Progresa/Oportunidades program in Mexico. Other work includes a book project on economic inequality with Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen; a paper on poverty and growth in a recent issue of the International Economic Review with Miguel Szekely, Undersecretary of Education in Mexico; a paper measuring multidimensional poverty with Sabina Alkire, Director of Oxford’s Poverty and Human Development Initiative; and research on inequality in human development in Latin America with Luis Felipe Lopez Calva, Chief Economist, UNDP, Latin America and the Caribbean. Professor Foster recently visited Harvard University where he co-taught a doctoral seminar on Welfare Economics with Professor Sen.
Education
Cornell University , (Ph.D. Economics, 1982)
Selma Fine Goldsmith Dissertation Award, 1982
McVoy Fellowship, Cornell University, 1979-81
New College, Florida (B.A. Economics and Mathematics, 1977)
Selected Publications
Foster J. E., M. McGillivray and S. Seth (2009), Rank Robustness of Composite Indices, Working Paper 26, Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, University of Oxford, Oxford.
“Counting and Multidimensional Poverty Measurement” (with Sabina Alkire), forthcoming in Journal of Public Economics.
“Freedom, Opportunity and Wellbeing,” forthcoming in the Handbook of Social Choice and Welfare, 2 (K. Arrow, A. Sen, and K. Suzumura, eds.), North Holland.
“On Measuring Vulnerability to Poverty” (with I. Dutta and A. Mishra) forthcoming in Social Choice and Welfare.
“The Foster-Greer-Thorbecke Poverty Measures: Twenty Five Years Later” (with J. Greer and E. Thorbecke), forthcoming in Journal of Economic Inequality.
“Polarization and the Decline of the Middle Class” (with M. C. Wolfson), forthcoming in Journal of Economic Inequality.
“Investing in Health: The Long-Term Impact of Head Start on Smoking” (with K. Anderson and D. Frisvold), forthcoming in Economic Inquiry.
“Is Economic Growth Good for the Poor? Tracking Low Incomes Using General Means” (with M. Székely), forthcoming, International Economic Review.
“External Capabilities” (with C. Handy), forthcoming in Arguments for a Better World: Essays in Honor of Amartya Sen (Kaushik Basu and Ravi Kanbur, Eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
“A Class of Chronic Poverty Measures” forthcoming in Poverty Dynamics: Towards Inter-disciplinary Approaches (Anthony Addison, David Hulme, and Ravi Kanbur, Eds), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
“Inequality Measurement” in The Elgar Companion to Development Studies (David Clark, Ed.), Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2006.
‘Poverty Indices’ in Poverty, Inequality and Development: Essays in Honor of Erik Thorbecke (Alain de Janvry and Ravi Kanbur, eds.), Amsterdam: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2005.
“Measuring the Distribution of Human Development: Methodology and an Application to Mexico” (with Luis F. Lopez Calva and M. Székely), Journal of Human Development, Volume 6, 2005, pp. 5 – 25.
