Erik Thorbecke
Encyclopedia
Erik Thorbecke is a distinguished development economist. He is a co-originator of the widely used Foster-Greer-Thorbecke poverty measure and played a significant role in the development and popularization of Social Accounting Matrix
Social accounting matrix
A Social Accounting Matrix represents flows of all economic transactions that take place within an economy . It is at the core, a matrix representation of the National Accounts for a given country, but can be extended to include non-national accounting flows, and created for whole regions or area...

. Currently, he is H. E. Babcock Professor of Economics & Food Economics, Emeritus, and Graduate School Professor at Cornell University
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

.

Biography

Thorbecke was born in Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...

, Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 in a prominent Dutch family. His great-grandfather Johan Rudolf Thorbecke virtually singlehandedly drafted the revision of the Constitution
Constitution
A constitution is a set of fundamental principles or established precedents according to which a state or other organization is governed. These rules together make up, i.e. constitute, what the entity is...

 of the Netherlands and served as Prime Minister
Prime minister
A prime minister is the most senior minister of cabinet in the executive branch of government in a parliamentary system. In many systems, the prime minister selects and may dismiss other members of the cabinet, and allocates posts to members within the government. In most systems, the prime...

 of the country on three occasions. His father Willem J. R. Thorbecke was a professor and served as an ambassador to China. His mother Madelaine Salisbury's great grandfather Fernando Wood
Fernando Wood
Fernando Wood was an American politician of the Democratic Party and mayor of New York City; he also served as a United States Representative and as Chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means in both the 45th and 46th Congress .A successful shipping merchant who became Grand Sachem of the...

 was a Mayor of New York City
Mayor of New York City
The Mayor of the City of New York is head of the executive branch of New York City's government. The mayor's office administers all city services, public property, police and fire protection, most public agencies, and enforces all city and state laws within New York City.The budget overseen by the...

. He married Charla J. Westerberg in 1954 and is the father of three sons.

Thorbecke spent his early years in Europe. He was a student (1948–51) at the Netherlands School of Economics (now part of Erasmus University Rotterdam) and got his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

 in 1957; he was also awarded an honorary doctorate
Doctorate
A doctorate is an academic degree or professional degree that in most countries refers to a class of degrees which qualify the holder to teach in a specific field, A doctorate is an academic degree or professional degree that in most countries refers to a class of degrees which qualify the holder...

 by the Ghent University
Ghent University
Ghent University is a Dutch-speaking public university located in Ghent, Belgium. It is one of the larger Flemish universities, consisting of 32,000 students and 7,100 staff members. The current rector is Paul Van Cauwenberge.It was established in 1817 by King William I of the Netherlands...

. After teaching at Iowa State University
Iowa State University
Iowa State University of Science and Technology, more commonly known as Iowa State University , is a public land-grant and space-grant research university located in Ames, Iowa, United States. Iowa State has produced astronauts, scientists, and Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners, along with a host of...

 from 1957 to 1973, Thorbecke moved to Ithaca
Ithaca
Ithaca or Ithaka is an island located in the Ionian Sea, in Greece, with an area of and a little more than three thousand inhabitants. It is also a separate regional unit of the Ionian Islands region, and the only municipality of the regional unit. It lies off the northeast coast of Kefalonia and...

 and spent rest of his professional career at Cornell University
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

. He also served as economic adviser to National Planning Institute, Lima
Lima
Lima is the capital and the largest city of Peru. It is located in the valleys of the Chillón, Rímac and Lurín rivers, in the central part of the country, on a desert coast overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Together with the seaport of Callao, it forms a contiguous urban area known as the Lima...

, Peru
Peru
Peru , officially the Republic of Peru , is a country in western South America. It is bordered on the north by Ecuador and Colombia, on the east by Brazil, on the southeast by Bolivia, on the south by Chile, and on the west by the Pacific Ocean....

 (1963–64); associate assistant administrator for program policy AID
United States Agency for International Development
The United States Agency for International Development is the United States federal government agency primarily responsible for administering civilian foreign aid. President John F. Kennedy created USAID in 1961 by executive order to implement development assistance programs in the areas...

, Washington
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....

 (1966–68); member of Research Advisory Committee (1976–81) and senior economist a the World Employment Program at the International Labor Office, Geneva
Geneva
Geneva In the national languages of Switzerland the city is known as Genf , Ginevra and Genevra is the second-most-populous city in Switzerland and is the most populous city of Romandie, the French-speaking part of Switzerland...

, (1972–73); Visiting Professor, Erasmus University Rotterdam (1980–81); Member of Committee on International Nutritional Programs NRC-NAS (1979–81); Director, Program on Comparative Economic Development, Cornell U. (1988), Senior Research fellow USAID Institute for Policy Reform (1990). At Cornell, he was affiliated with the departments of economics (which he chaired in 1974-78), agricultural economics, and nutritional sciences.

Thorbecke's academic contributions have been primarily in the field of development economics
Development economics
Development Economics is a branch of economics which deals with economic aspects of the development process in low-income countries. Its focus is not only on methods of promoting economic growth and structural change but also on improving the potential for the mass of the population, for example,...

. In 1984, he published the article "A Class of Decomposable Poverty Measures" in Econometrica
Econometrica
Econometrica is a peer-reviewed academic journal of economics, publishing articles not only in econometrics but in many areas of economics. It is published by the Econometric Society and distributed by Wiley-Blackwell. Econometrica is one of the most highly ranked economics journals in the world...

 with his former student Professor Joel Greer and another graduate student at Cornell at the time, Professor James Foster. The Foster-Greer-Thorbecke (sometimes referred to as FGT) metric is a generalized measure of poverty within an economy. It combines information on the extent of poverty (as measured by the Headcount ratio), the intensity of poverty
Poverty
Poverty is the lack of a certain amount of material possessions or money. Absolute poverty or destitution is inability to afford basic human needs, which commonly includes clean and fresh water, nutrition, health care, education, clothing and shelter. About 1.7 billion people are estimated to live...

 (as measured by the Total Poverty Gap) and inequality among the poor (as measured by the Gini
Gini coefficient
The Gini coefficient is a measure of statistical dispersion developed by the Italian statistician and sociologist Corrado Gini and published in his 1912 paper "Variability and Mutability" ....

 and the coefficient of variation
Coefficient of variation
In probability theory and statistics, the coefficient of variation is a normalized measure of dispersion of a probability distribution. It is also known as unitized risk or the variation coefficient. The absolute value of the CV is sometimes known as relative standard deviation , which is...

 for the poor). FGT measure is widely used and a special version of the index is officially a part of the Mexican Constitution as a basis for all government measurements of poverty.

Along with Professor Graham Pyatt, Thorbecke played a significant role in the development and popularization of Social Accounting Matrix
Social accounting matrix
A Social Accounting Matrix represents flows of all economic transactions that take place within an economy . It is at the core, a matrix representation of the National Accounts for a given country, but can be extended to include non-national accounting flows, and created for whole regions or area...

. Social Accounting Matrices (SAM) represents flows of all economic transactions that take place within an economy (regional or national). It is at the core, a matrix representation of the National Accounts for a given country, but can be extended to include non-national accounting flows, and created for whole regions or area. SAMs refer to a single year providing a static picture of the economy.

A conference entitled "Poverty, Inequality and Development: A Conference in Honor of Erik Thorbecke" was held at Cornell University in 2003.

Professor Erik Thorbecke has authored or edited over 25 books and monographs and published over 200 technical articles in professional journals including the American Economic Review
American Economic Review
The American Economic Review is a peer-reviewed academic journal of economics publishing seven issues annually by the American Economic Association. First published in 1911, it is considered one of the most prestigious journals in the field. The current editor-in-chief is Penny Goldberg . The...

, American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Econometrica
Econometrica
Econometrica is a peer-reviewed academic journal of economics, publishing articles not only in econometrics but in many areas of economics. It is published by the Econometric Society and distributed by Wiley-Blackwell. Econometrica is one of the most highly ranked economics journals in the world...

, Economic Development and Cultural Change, the Economic Journal, Journal of African Economies
Journal of African economies
The Journal of African Economies is published five times a year by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford. The journal publishes economic analyses, focused entirely on Africa...

, Journal of Development Economics
Journal of Development Economics
The Journal of Development Economics is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by Elsevier. It was established in 1974 and is considered the top field journal in development economics....

, Journal of Policy Modeling, and World Development.

Selected Publications

  • J. Foster, J. Greer, and E. Thorbecke, "FGT Twenty Five Years Later," Journal of Economic Inequality, 2010.
  • P. Cornelisse and E. Thorbecke, Exchange and Development; the Anatomy of Economic Transactions, Edward Elgar, 2010 (forthcoming).
  • M. Nissanke and E. Thorbecke (editors), The Poor under Globalization in Asia, Latin America and Asia, Oxford University Press, 2010.
  • Fosu A., G. Mwabu, and E. Thorbecke (editors), Poverty in Africa; Analytical and Policy Perspectives, University of Nairobi Press, 2009.
  • E. Thorbecke and M. Nissanke, "The Impact of Globalization on the Poor in Latin America, " Economia, 2008.
  • E. Thorbecke, "The Evolution of the Development Doctrine, 1900-2005" in G. Mavrotos and A. Shorrocks (editors), Advancing Development, Palgrave MacMillan, 2007.
  • E. Thorbecke, "Economic Development, Equality, Income Distribution, and Ethics" in M. Altman (editor), Handbook of Behavioral Economics, M.E. Sharpe, 2006.
  • D. Stifel and E. Thorbecke, "A Dual-Dual CGE Model of an Arch-type African Economy: Trade Reform, Migration and Poverty," Journal of Policy Modeling, 2003.
  • E. Thorbecke, "Towards a Stochastic Social Accounting Matrix for Modeling," Economic Systems Research, 2003.
  • E. Thorbecke and C. Charumilind, "Economic inequality and its socioeconomic impact," World Development, 2002.
  • E. Thorbecke and H-S Jung, "A Multiplier Decomposition Method to Analyze Poverty Alleviation," Journal of Development Economics, 1996.
  • E. Thorbecke and collaborators, Adjustment and Equity in Indonesia, OECD Development Centre, 1991.
  • J. Greer and E. Thorbecke, "A methodology for measuring food poverty applied to Kenya," Journal of Development Economics, 1986.
  • J. Foster, J. Greer, and E. Thorbecke, "A Class of Decomposable Poverty Measures," Econometrica, 1984.
  • J. Defourny and E. Thorbecke, "Structural Path Analysis and Multiplier Decomposition within a Social Accounting Matrix," Economic Journal, 1984.
  • G. Pyatt and E. Thorbecke, Planning Techniques for a Better Future, International Labour Office, 1976.
  • E. Thorbecke (editor), Role of Agriculture in Economic Development, Columbia University Press for National Bureau of Economic Research, 1968.
  • K. Fox, J. Sengupta, and E. Thorbecke, Theory of Quantitative Economic Policy, North Holland Publishing Co, 1966 and 1968.
  • I. Adelman and E. Thorbecke (editors), Theory and Design of Economic Development, Johns Hopkins Press, 1966.
  • E. Thorbecke, "The Impact of the European Economic Community on the Pattern of World Trade," American Economic Review, 1963.
  • E. Thorbecke, The Tendency Towards Regionalization in International Trade, Martinus Nijhoff, 1960.

External links

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