NCAER Seminar

A Multidimensional Index of Service Delivery

James Foster George Washington University

Thursday, December 18, 2014 3.30 pm – 5.00 pm NCAER Conference Room

Please join us for a seminar on “A Multidimensional Index of Service Delivery” by James Foster, Professor of Economics, George Washington University.

Twenty five years ago, the FGT class of decomposable measures was introduced in Foster, Greer, and Thorbecke (1984). There have been many extensions of this work, with contributions made to measurement, axiomatics, and to application. As an extension of the original FGT work, the multidimensional poverty framework of Alkire and Foster (2011) is influencing the way poverty is being measured globally (UNDP's Multidimensional Poverty Index) and within countries (the official measures of Mexico and Colombia). It has also been applied to other multidimensional measurement problems, such as measuring wellbeing (Bhutan's Gross National Happiness Index) and measuring women's empowerment (USAID's Women’s' Empowerment in Agriculture Index).

In this seminar, Foster will discuss why the same multidimensional methods might be particularly well suited to monitor the delivery of basic public services such as health, education and water and sanitation. To illustrate this, he will present a cross-country comparison of healthcare delivery for Rwanda, Uganda, and Tanzania using Service Provision Assessment data from the Demographic and Health Surveys.

James E. Foster is Professor of Economics and International Affairs at the George Washington University (GWU) in Washington DC. Foster’s research focuses on welfare economics. He has held faculty positions in Purdue’s Krannert School of Management and Vanderbilt’s Department of Economics before joining GWU. He is a Research Associate at Oxford’s Poverty and Human Development Initiative and a member of the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group in the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics at the University of Chicago. He is currently on sabbatical from GWU at Mansfield College, Oxford and at the , and will be working with NCAER on the new multidimensional index of service delivery. He has a PhD in economics from Cornell.

Please join us for tea after the seminar. For queries, please contact Ms Sudesh Bala at [email protected] or on 011-2345-2669.

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