JAMES FOSTER
Professor Foster is an expert on evaluating inequality and poverty and understanding their economic and social consequences. His 1984 paper introduced the the well known FGT poverty measures, which have been frequently invoked in theoretical and empirical analyses of poverty, including India's Ninth Plan. This poverty formula is also used as the basis for targeting in Mexico's $1.6 billion Progresa program, and appears in the Mexican Constitution in this context.
Recent work
includes a 1997 joint book project on inequality with Nobel Laureate
Amartya Sen, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, two papers with
Professor Kaushik Basu on literacy in India, a paper with Professor
Tapan Mitra, Chairman of the Department of Economics at Cornell, on
ranking investment projects, and several with Miguel Szekely formerly
of the Inter-American Development Bank and currently in the President's
office in Mexico, on poverty, inequality and growth.
Professor Foster has been a core member of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur
Network on Poverty and Inequality in a Broader Perspective. As Director of
the Graduate Program in Economic Development at Vanderbilt University, he recently
was part of a consortium that successfully obtain a $13 million USAID contract
for improving teaching capacity in economics and business in Central Asia.
Professor Foster recently received a quarter-million dollar Investigator Award
in Health Policy Research from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for a project
entitled "Understanding Health Disparities from an Economic Perspictive".
This two-year project will develop an evaluative framework for discussing health
disparities and will study the interplay of other welfare-relevant economic
variables and health outcomes. Specific objectives are: (1) To provide a clarifying
conceptual foundation for the current discussion on U.S. health disparities
using recent advances from economic theory, and in particular to inform the
debate on whether the health effects of socioeconomic status are relative or
absolute; (2) To provide a conceptual framework for the "relative income
hypothesis" (which links relative income inequality to health outcomes)
and to explore its broader validity; (3) To explore a "relative education
hypothesis", which posits a negative relationship between health and inequalities
in education (4) To explore a "proximate literacy hypothesis" which
posits that low literacy persons receive health benefits from their literate
household members.
An unrelated paper entitled "Measuring Health Inequality Using Qualitative
Data" written jointly with former student R. Andrew Allison (of the Kansas
Health Institute), outlines a new methodology for evaluating inequality in
health when the outcome variable is categorical rather than quantitative. The
methodology is then applied to data on Self-reported Health Status to compare
health across states in the U.S. An earlier version of this paper appeared
in the working paper series of the Harvard Center for Population and Development
Studies, Harvard Public School of Health, and it is currently under review.
A second paper entitled "Healthy People 2010 and 20th century patterns
of racial mortality" written with Dr. Robert levine of Meharry Medical
College (and several others) attempts to document the persistent racial inequality
in health outcomes in the U.S. In particular, we find that the age-adjusted
mortality rate is 50% higher for African-Americans than whites and has been
so for the entire course of the last century. We are currently revising the
paper.