Barbara Fraumeni is a Special-term Professor at the Central University of Finance and Economics, a Senior Fellow at Hunan University in China, Professor Emerita of Public Policy at the Muskie School of Public Service, University of Southern Maine, Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, United States, and a Research Fellow of the IZA Network, Germany. She is an authority on human capital (World Bank, UN, and OECD) and nonhuman capital, economic growth, productivity, non-market accounts, and public roads infrastructure. In 2021, the book Dr. Fraumeni edited and contributed to as an author: Measuring Human Capital, was published by Academic Press. She is a former program officer with the National Science Foundation and Chief Economist at the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. While serving as Chief Economist at the Bureau of Economic Analysis, she was part of a team responsible for modifying the National Accounts to treat Research and Development as an investment and assess its contribution to economic growth. She has won CSWEP’s Carolyn Shaw Bell award for advancing the status of women in the economics profession and a U.S. Department of Commerce Gold Medal for her innovative research treating R&D as investment in GDP.
Dr. Fraumeni did the pioneer work in developing the popular Jorgenson-Fraumeni (J-F) method of calculating human capital stock in 1989. Over the past three decades, the J-F method has become one of the most precise and widely used methods in constructing human capital accounts to date. She has been a leader of the "China Human Capital Measurement and Human Capital Index Project" funded by China National Natural Science Foundation and Central University of Finance and Economics, conducted by the China Center for Human Capital and Labor Market Research (CHLR). Dr. Fraumeni has led faculty members and graduate students at CHLR in creating China’s first set of systematic and scientific measurements of human capital using the J-F approach and quantifying its distribution and dynamics.
