James Foster
James Foster
Former Director, Oliver T. Carr, Jr. Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Economics, Vice Dean, Elliott School of International Affairs
Former Director
Contact:
The Elliott School of International Affairs
Foggy Bottom Campus
1957 E Street, NW, Suite 502
Washington DC 20052
James is also a Research Associate at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative at Oxford University. Professor Foster’s research focuses on welfare economics — using economic tools to evaluate and enhance the wellbeing of people. His joint 1984 Econometrica paper (with Joel Greer and Erik Thorbecke) is one of the most cited papers on poverty. It introduced the FGT Index, which has been used in thousands of studies and was employed in targeting the Progresa CCT program in Mexico. Other research includes work on economic inequality with Amartya Sen; on the distribution of human development with Luis Felipe Lopez-Calva and Miguel Szekely; on multidimensional poverty with Sabina Alkire; and on literacy with Kaushik Basu.
Professor Foster’s work underlies many well-known social indices including the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) published annually by the UNDP in the Human Development Report, dozens of national MPIs used to guide domestic policy against poverty, the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) at USAID, the Gross National Happiness Index of Bhutan, the Better Jobs Index of the InterAmerican Development Bank, and the Statistical Performance Index of the World Bank.
development economics, inequality and poverty, economic theory and policy
Ph.D. from Cornell University
Development, Poverty, and Inequality, Economics of Ultra-Poverty, U.S.- China Economic Relations, Global Economic Governance
“Unidimensional Underpinnings of Multidimensional Counting Measures,” (with S. Alkire)
“Rank Robustness of Composite Indices: Dominance and Ambiguity,” (with M. McGillivray and S. Seth)
“Service Delivery Underperformance Index” (with M. Allwine)
“Analyzing Intergenerational Mobility: Measures, Curves, and Welfare” (with J. Rothbaum)
“A Framework for Measuring Inclusive Growth”
“Measuring Ultrapoverty: A New Class of Indices and an Application to Rural Ethiopia Panel Data” (with S. Smith)
“Reflections on the Human Development Index”
“On Provenance and Value” (with E. F. Fischer)
“Income Standards, Inequality and Poverty”
“Inclusive Growth in Five Asian Countries” (with M. Szekely)
“Designing the Inequality-Adjusted Human Development Index” (with S. Alkire)
“Reflections on the Human Opportunity Index” (with S. Singh)
“Poverty Lines over Time and Space” (with M. Székely)
“Evaluating Dimensional and Distributional Contributions to Multidimensional Poverty” (with S. Alkire)
“Person-Equivalent Poverty Measures” (with T. Castleman and S. Smith)
“Measurement as Social Choice: Commentary on Sen’s Social Choice and Welfare Economics, in The State of Economics, The State of the World (K. Basu, ed.), MIT Press, 2020.
“Ranking Investment Projects” (with T. Mitra), Economic Theory, Volume 22, 2003, pp. 469-494.
“On Measuring Literacy” (with K. Basu), Economic Journal, Volume 108, November 1998, pp.1733-1749.
“Complementarily Yours: Free Examination Copies and Textbook Prices” (with A. Horowitz), International Journal of Industrial Organization, Volume 14, 1996, pp. 85-99.
Graduate
Econ 8352-Development Economics
Major analytic concepts, measures, theoretical models, and empirical methods of development economics.
Undergraduate
Econ 2151-Economic Development
Theories and empirical studies of the economic problems of developing countries.
IAFF 2040-Introduction to Game Theory and Strategic Thinking
A basic introduction developed with a Washington audience in mind. Co-taught with Kaushik Basu, Chief Economist at the World Bank.
I also contribute one lecture to the course World on a Plate, let by Chef Jose Andrés, and organize (with Aaditya Dar) a weekly Development Tea, which discusses recent work by faculty, friends and grad students.
July-August 2010. Multidimensional Poverty Debate. There has been an extremely informative debate between Duncan Green, Head of Research for Oxfam, Martin Ravallion, Director of the World Bank’s Development Research Group, Sabina Alkire, Gabriel Demombynes, Senior Economist in the Nairobi office of the World Bank, and James Foster. The debate extended over two blogs: Oxfam and the World Bank. The links are given in a summary.
12th August 2010. Article in the New York Times A long article on India and the impact of the MPI results on the country.
9 August 2010. Linked article in the New York Times An article about hunger in India refers to results from the MPI study, and the online version links to the BBC’s coverage.
3 August 2010. Photographic essay in the Huffington Post An article in the Huffington Post provides a clear description of the MPI and presents the ten poorest countries in photographs.
29 July 2010. Full page article in The Economist The Economist gives a thorough discussion of the MPI and includes an online interview with Sabina Alkire and additional discussion on the Economist’s Blog.
28-29 July, 2010. Columbia Conference. The Colombian government and OPHI hold a conference on poverty measurement. Three hundred academics, government officials and NGO representatives attend. The government presents its new multidimensional methodology based on Alkire-Foster.
26 July 2010. Editorial in The Lancet The Lancet, one of the most respected general medical journal, presented an editorial that described the MPI methodology and its advantages.
26 July 2010. Briefing in Time Magazine Time identified the MPI release as number 4 of the World’s 10 Essential Stories for the week in its Briefing Section.
20 July 2010. Speech by President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia. ‘But poverty is not only the absence of income. The Multidimensional Poverty Index which has just been launched by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, and which examines 10 dimensions of education, health and the standard of living, in a recent report indicates that poverty in Colombia is 9 percent.
14 July 2010. News coverage of release The release was covered by a virtually all Indian Newspapers. The UK the coverage included The Guardian, the New Statesman, BBC (Radio and print), Al-Jazeera (Television), Reuters AlertNet, among others. Other countries represented include US, Holland, Pakistan, China, the Philippines, Colombia, Kenya, Lebanon, France, Ethiopia, Nepal, Bangladesh, and South Africa.
14 July 2010. Joint UNDP-OPHI release of MPI The UN Development Programme announced that the 16 year old Human Poverty Index (HPI) is being replaced by the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) in the 20th Anniversary Human Development Report (HDR). The MPI was constructed using the Alkire-Foster methodology by researchers at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI). The cross country empirical work was conducted by Sabina Alkire the Director of OPHI and Maria Emma Santos, a former doctoral student of Foster. The announcement and the advanced release of the 104 country poverty results took place in London, with Jeni Klugman (Editor of the 2010 HDR), Sabina Alkire and James Foster present.
12 July 2010. MPI in India. An article on the MPI in the world’s largest circulation English language newspaper.
2 July 2010. Article in the Financial Times An article on the Chile conference discusses the Alkire-Foster Methodology in depth.
13-14 May 2010. Chile Conference Chile and OPHI hold a conference on multidimensional poverty that highlights the Alkire-Foster methodology. Three hundred representatives from some 12 Latin American Countries were in attendance.
7 March 2010. Cover story in Chronicle of Higher Education This article is an in depth discussion of the multidimensional poverty measure, and more generally on how academic work can impact the real world. It is accompanied by an online audio interview. A follow-up on the Chronicle’s blog related the approach to work on updating the US poverty standard. A second update on the blog links to the discussion of Indian poverty and to Bhutan’s Gross Happiness Index (also built on the Alkire-Foster foundation).
10 December 2009. Mexico Release Mexico selects an official multidimensional poverty measure that is related to Alkire-Foster. The Mexican methodology is outlined in this presentation.