Erik Thorbecke is the H. E. Babcock Professor of Economics and Food Economics Emeritus and former director of the Program on Comparative Economic Development at Cornell University.

He made pioneering contributions in the areas of economic and agricultural development, the measurement and analysis of poverty and malnutrition, the Social Accounting Matrix and general equilibrium modeling, and international economic policy. Thorbecke is one of the creators of the Foster-Greer-Thorbecke (FGT) metric for measuring poverty. The metric has been adopted as the standard poverty measure by the World Bank and practically all UN agencies and is used almost universally by researchers doing empirical work on poverty. He is the author or coauthor of more than 25 books and over 150 articles.