The Faculty of Economics and Business, Universitas Indonesia (FEB UI) and the T20 Task Force 5 (TF5) team, in collaboration with the University of Oxford’s Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), are hosting a culminative Side Event, which acts as the final and concluding forum of a series of discussions led by the T20’s Task Force 5, on solutions and policy recommendations to the challenges G20 nations are facing with regard to poverty, inequality, human capital and wellbeing.

James is a Research Associate at OPHI, alongside being a Professor of Economics and International Affairs at The Elliott School of International Affairs at The George Washington University.

He held positions at the Krannert School of Management at Purdue University and the 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.

James’s research focuses on welfare economics — using economic tools to evaluate the wellbeing of people. His joint 1984 Econometrica paper is one of the most cited papers on poverty: it introduced the FGT Index, which 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 the International Economic Review with Miguel Szekely, Undersecretary of Education in Mexico; a paper measuring multidimensional poverty with Sabina Alkire, Director of OPHI; and research on inequality in human development in Latin America with Luis Felipe Lopez Calva, Chief Economist at UNDP in Latin America and the Caribbean.

He holds a Doctorate Honoris Causa, from Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Hidalgo (Mexico).