He is a co-originator of the widely used Foster-Greer-Thorbecke poverty measure and played a significant role in the development and popularization of Social Accounting Matrix.

[2] His great-grandfather Johan Rudolf Thorbecke virtually singlehandedly drafted the revision of the Constitution of the Netherlands and served as Prime Minister of the country on three occasions.

His mother Madelaine Salisbury's great grandfather Fernando Wood was a Mayor of New York City.

The entry "Foster-Greer-Thorbecke Index" by Yanan Chen in the "The SAGE Encyclopedia of World Poverty" explains the working of the measure.

Following in the footsteps of Sir Richard Stone, Graham Pyatt and Erik Thorbecke played a significant role in the development and popularization of the Social Accounting Matrix (SAM).

SAMs capture flows of all economic and financial transactions that take place within an economy (regional or national) among and between disaggregated production sectors, factors of production, institutions (including the government and socio-economic household groups) and the rest of the world.