Abstract:

The World Bank and IFC's Doing Business project has used indicators capturing important dimensions of the business environment to catalyze reforms in a large number of countries. In its tenth year of operation, this talk will focus on the methodological underpinnings of the project, the results obtained on the ground, the challenges ahead and why this matters for the goal of poverty reduction and economic convergence. For more information, please visit: www.doingbusiness.org

Speaker Bio:

Augusto Lopez-Claros became the director of global indicators and analysis in the World Bank–IFC Financial and Private Sector Development Vice Presidency in March 2011. Previously he was chief economist and director of the Global Competitiveness Program at the World Economic Forum in Geneva, where he was the editor of the Global Competitiveness Report, the Forum’s flagship publication, as well as a number of regional economic reports.

Before joining the Forum he was an executive director with Lehman Brothers (London) and a senior international economist. He was the International Monetary Fund’s resident representative in the Russian Federation during 1992–95. Before joining the IMF, Lopez-Claros was a professor of economics at the University of Chile in Santiago. He was educated in England and the United States, receiving a diploma in mathematical statistics from Cambridge University and a PhD in economics from Duke University. He is a much-sought-after international speaker, having lectured in the last several years at some of the world’s leading universities and think tanks. In 2007 he was a coeditor of The International Monetary System, the IMF, and the G-20: A Great Transformation in the Making? and The Humanitarian Response Index: Measuring Commitment to Best Practice, both published by Palgrave. He was the editor of The Innovation for Development Report 2009–2010: Strengthening Innovation for the Prosperity of Nations, published by Palgrave in November 2009.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon presented a free public talk at Stanford on Thursday, Jan. 17.

Ban, who is the eighth secretary-general of the UN, will speak about the UN's role in creating opportunities out of the challenges posed by today's rapidly transitioning world.

"Times of transition are times of profound opportunity," he recently said during his acceptance speech for the Seoul Peace Prize. "The decisions we make in this period will have an impact for generations to come.”

Ban's initiatives as UN secretary-general have focused on promoting sustainable development; empowering women; supporting countries in crisis or instability; generating new momentum on disarmament, arms control, and nonproliferation; and strengthening the UN. Among his many activities as secretary-general, he has successfully raised major pledges and financing packages for aid and crisis response, established the agency UN Women, and introduced new measures to promote UN transparency and efficiency.

Ban was born in the Republic of Korea in 1944, and he served for 37 years with the ROK Foreign Ministry, in roles including that of minister of foreign affairs and trade, foreign policy adviser to the president, and chief national security adviser to the president. He took office as UN secretary-general in January 2007, and was re-elected for a second term by the UN General Assembly in June 2011. Ban will serve as secretary-general until December 2016.

The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies are co-sponsoring the event. Ban's talk, part of the Asia-Pacific Leaders Forum, will kick off a series of activities commemorating Shorenstein APARC's thirtieth anniversary.

Founded in 2005, Shorenstein APARC's Asia-Pacific Leaders Forum regularly convenes senior leaders from across Asia and the Pacific to exchange ideas on current political, economic, and social dynamics in the region.

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In the ninth session of the Strategic Forum, former senior American and South Korean government officials and leading experts focused on leadership changes on and around the Korean Peninsula and the possible implications for North Korea policy, the U.S.-South Korea alliance, and Northeast Asia. They analyzed North Korean behavior under its new leader Kim Jong-un and the likelihood his regime would continue nuclear and missile development. Participants also compared and contrasted the North Korea and alliance policies of South Korea’s leading candidates in the December 19 presidential election. The session was hosted by the Sejong Institute, a top South Korean think tank, in Seoul, in association with the Korean Studies Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.

PARTICIPANTS

Republic of Korea:

Chul Hyun Kwon, Chairman of the Board, The Sejong Foundation

Dae Sung Song, President, The Sejong Institute

Sang Woo Rhee, President, New Asia Research Institite

Jae Chang Kim, Co-Chairman, Council on US-Korea Security Studies

Myung Hwan Yu, Former Minister, Foreign Affairs & Trade Ministry

Yong Ok Park, Governor, PyungAn Nam-do Province (North Korea territory)

Se Hee Yoo, Chairman, Daily NK; Hanyang University

Ho Sup Kim, Professor, Chung-ang University; Chairman, KPSA (2012)

Young Sun Ha, Chairman, East Asia Institute

Jung Hoon Lee, Professor, Yonsei University

Seong Whun Cheon, Chief, North Korea Studies Center, KINU

Chol Ho Chong, Research Fellow, The Sejong Institute

United States:

Gi-Wook Shin, Director, Shorenstein APARC, Stanford University

Michael Armacost, Distinguished Fellow, Shorenstein APARC

Bruce Bennett, Senior Research Fellow, RAND Cooperation

Karl Eikenberry, Distinguished Fellow, Shorenstein APARC

Thomas Fingar, Distinguished Fellow, Shorenstein APARC

David Kang, Director, Korean Studies Institute, University of Southern California

T.J. Pempel, Professor, Political Science Dept., University of California, Berkeley

Daniel C. Sneider, Associate Director for Research, Shorenstein APARC

David Straub, Associate Director, Korean Studies Program, Shorenstein APARC

Joyce Lee, Research Associate, Korean Studies Program, Shorenstein APARC 

Providing people with safe drinking water is one of the most important health-related infrastructure programs in the world. The first part of our research investigates the effect of a major water quality improvement program in rural China on the health of adults and children. Using panel data covering about 4500 households from 1989 to 2006, we estimate the impact of introducing village-level access to water from water plants on various measures of health. The regression results imply that the illness incidence of adults decreased by 11 percent and their weight-for-height increased by 0.835 kg/m, and that children's weight-for-height and height itself both rose by 0.446 kg/m and 0.962 cm respectively, as a result of the program. And these estimates are quite stable across different robustness checks.

While the previous research has shown health benefit of safe drinking water program, we know little about the longer-term benefits such as education. The second part of our research examines the youth education benefits of this major drinking water infrastructure program. By employing a longitudinal dataset with around 12,000 individual observations aged between 16 and 25, we find that this health program has benefited their education substantially: increasing the grades of education completed by 0.9 years and their probabilities of graduating from a lower and upper middle schools by around 18 and 89 percent, respectively. These estimation results are robust to a host of robustness checks, such as controlling for educational policy and local resources (by including county-year fixed effects), village distance to schools, local labor market conditions, educational demand, instrumenting the water treatment dummy with topographic variables, among others. Our estimates suggest that this program is highly cost-effective.

Jing Zhang, an assistant professor, received her PhD from the University of Maryland in 2011, and joined Renmin University of China in the same year. Prior to that, she worked at the World Bank from 2010 to 2011. The focus of her research lies in health economics and public finance. Her publications include: “The Impact of Water Quality on Health: Evidence from the Drinking Water Infrastructure Program in Rural China,” Journal of Health Economics (2012) and “Soft Budget Constraints in China: Evidence from the Guangdong Hospital Industry,” International Journal of Healthcare Finance and Economics (2009).

Abstract:

This talk will unveil the story of Taiwan’s economic transformation between 1949 and 1960, as Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist leaders turned away from a command economy to build a market economy more productive than any in Chinese history.

The talk gives special attention to how a small group ofpolitical and economic leaders began to formulate and later implement a bold new economic vision for Taiwan. In the process, they embraced institutional and organizational innovations that led to a dismantling of Taiwan's earlier centralized command economy and the growth of a new market system.

Much information in this research was obtained from historical papers that were recently made available at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University: the diaries of Chiang Kai-shek, Kuomintang party archives, and personal papers of Kuomintang leaders. It also makes use of first-hand oral interviews with former Nationalist officials and economists.

Speaker Bio:

Tai-chun Kuo is Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. She was a Visiting Lecturer at the Center for East Asian Studies, Stanford University (2003) and Associate Professor at the Graduate Institute of American Studies, Tamkang University (Taiwan, 1997-2000). Prior to these positions, she served as Press Secretary to the President of the Republic of China (1990-1995), Deputy Director-General of the First Bureau of the Presidential Office (1989-1997), and Director of the ROC Government Information Office in Boston (1987-1988).

Outside of her own research, since 2003 she has assisted the Hoover Institution Archives in developing its Modern China Archives and Special Collections, including Kuomintang (Nationalist) party archives, diaries of Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang Ching-kuo, personal papers of T. V. Soong, H. H. K’ung, and other leading Chinese individuals.

Her major publications include Taiwan's Economic Transformation: Leadership, Property Rights, and Institutional Change; T. V. Soong in Modern Chinese History, China’s Quest for Unification, National Security, and Modernization; Breaking with the Past: China’s First Market Economy; Watching Communist China, 1949-79: A Methodological Review of China Studies in the United States of America and Taiwan; and The Power and Personality of Mao Tse-tung, among others.

Abstract:

It has long been recognized that corruption and clientelism feed upon each other. However, how public malfeasance affects citizens' willingness to engage in patron-client relations remains unexplored. This article shows that perceptions, experiences, and information about political corruption influence a citizen's likelihood to sell his or her vote, and the types of gifts, favors, or public services he or she is willing to trade for it. The context of the article is Mexico's presidential and local elections. To circumvent methodological challenges posed by social desirability bias and reverse causation, the article presents evidence from a list experiment embedded in a national representative survey conducted close to the 2012 presidential election, and evidence from a field experiment conducted close to the 2009 municipal elections. I conclude that, given favorable circumstances, governmental corruption breeds forms of political behavior that are detrimental to the proper functioning of democracy, such as vote buying.

About the Speaker:

Ana L. De La O is assistant professor of Political Science at Yale University. She is affiliated with the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, the Institution of Social and Policy Studies, and the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. Her research relates to the political economy of poverty alleviation, clientelism and the provision of public goods. She recently completed a book manuscript that explores the causes and political consequences of the proliferation of Conditional Cash Transfers in Latin America. Her work has been published in academic journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, and the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. She earned her PhD in Political Science from M.I.T.