A new SIEPR policy brief examines the growing life expectancy gap between low-income and high-income Americans. Coauthored by Victor R. Fuchs and APARC Deputy Director Karen Eggleston, the brief shows that life expectancy in the U.S. can be increased if health policy shifts towards preventing the leading causes of death for young people. READ MORE>>

Even as Indian officials watch the rise of China and recent changes to its foreign policy with apprehension, they prefer to avoid having to choose sides between the United States and China.

That sentiment marked the keynote address by veteran journalist Siddharth Varadarajan, winner of the 2017 Shorenstein Journalism Award. Speaking on April 16 at the Award’s sixteenth anniversary panel discussion titled “India, the United States, and China: The New Triangle in Asia,” Varadarajan described a triangle where all three parties were in flux.

The award recognizes Varadarajan’s exemplary record of excellence in reporting on India’s domestic and foreign affairs in both traditional and new media. As founding editor of The Wire, Varadarajan combines innovative digital strategies with quality reporting that advances positive social, economic, and political change.

“Today we can see, across Asia as well as the United States, that journalism has been somewhat reinvigorated by… the growth of authoritarianism,” said Daniel Sneider, Shorenstein APARC visiting scholar, who chaired the noon panel. “I think we feel even more vindicated in hosting this award…and giving some attention to people who are making this kind of contribution.”

Thomas Fingar, a China specialist and a Shorenstein APARC fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, and Nayan Chandra, the founder, former editor-in-chief, and current consulting editor of YaleGlobal Online magazine, joined Varadarajan on the panel.

The panelists addressed a host of questions related to Indian foreign policy under the geopolitical construct of a rising China and a retreating United States. Although the China-India-U.S. triangle has existed for some time, Varadarajan argued that present conditions make it an important topic for renewed discussion.

Pointing to recent internal changes by president Xi Jinping, India’s departure from the so-called Nehruvian consensus, as well as the unpredictability of U.S. foreign and trade polices under the Trump presidency, Varadarajan depicted a triangle comprised of shifting segment lengths and angles. He reviewed the India-U.S. and the India-China relationships and their evolution over the last decade-and-a-half; outlined significant changes in China’s foreign and economic policies over the last eight years; and elucidated the U.S.-India response to these changes.

Since 1998 and India’s declaration of its status as a nuclear power, U.S.-India relations have seen a succession of rises and falls under each presidency, with the present administration being no exception. “When the rest of the world was ambiguous, ambivalent, a bit worried about what the United States might do under Trump,” Varadarajan said, “Prime Minister Modi was one of the few world leaders to actually seek a doubling down of the relationship." Over the same period, India-China relations tended to follow a similar pattern of peaks and troughs, albeit in a reversed pattern. “If you look broadly at the India-China relationship,” Varadarajan summated, “it’s a textbook case of how improvements in economic relations and improvements in trade do not necessarily lead to improvements in political relations."

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Varadarajan closed his remarks by arguing against the existing viewpoint of the triangle as a zero-sum game. “You cannot, on the one hand, talk of the need for a free and open Indo-Pacific region and, on the other hand, create forums or architecture that in some ways are designed to keep the Chinese out… India's interests lie perhaps in an architecture that is genuinely inclusive.”

The Shorenstein Journalism Award, which carries a cash prize of $10,000, recognizes accomplished journalists committed to critical reporting on and exploring the complexities of Asia through their writing. It alternates between honoring recipients from the West, who mainly address American audiences, and recipients from Asia, who pave the way for freedom of the press in their countries. Established in 2002, the award honors the legacy of Mr. Walter H. Shorenstein. A visionary businessman, philanthropist, and champion of Asian-American relations, Shorenstein was dedicated to promoting excellence in journalism and deeper understanding of Asia.

Varadarajan called the award a “boost to those of us in India who are fighting the good fight of keeping independent journalism alive-and kicking under difficult circumstances.”

Watch Varadarajan’s keynote speech:

New Study Examines How Stanford Alumni’s Entrepreneurship Rates Differ by Ethnicity and Nationality, Finding Substantial Gap between Asian Americans and Non-American Asians

The role of Stanford University as a leading hub for innovation and the wide impact of the university’s entrepreneurship education and opportunities on Silicon Valley and beyond are well recognized. Less explored, however, is the question of how the entrepreneurship rates of Stanford alumni differ by ethnicity and nationality. In particular, how do Asian Americans and non-American Asians alumni compare in their entrepreneurship activities, and how do their entrepreneurship rates change with participation in university entrepreneurship education programs?

Yong Suk Lee, deputy director of the Korea Program at Shorenstein APARC and the SK Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Charles (Chuck) Eesley, associate professor and W.M. Keck Foundation faculty scholar in the Department of Management Science and Engineering, had the perfect data set to answer these questions. They analyzed a representative sample constructed from the Stanford Innovation Survey, a novel survey administered in 2011 to over 140,000 Stanford alumni—all living Stanford graduates since the 1930s. The survey asks about respondents’ entrepreneurship status and whether they were active investors, and provides rich information on alumni’s ethnicity and nationality, as well as on parental entrepreneurship. 

Lee and Eesley describe the results of their analysis in a new study, “the persistence of entrepreneurship and innovative immigrants,” published in Research Policy. This is the first journal article to use the Stanford Innovation Survey. Lee sat down with Noa Ronkin, APARC’s associate director for communications and external relations, to discuss the study’s findings and policy implications.

How did you get involved with this research project and with using the Stanford Innovation Survey?

I had already been studying entrepreneurship when I happened to meet Chuck Eesley, whose research focuses on the role of the institutional and university environment in technology entrepreneurship. I learned that Chuck had conducted the Stanford Innovation Survey and that he had not yet had the opportunity to dig fully into the data.

One question I had in mind was: What does entrepreneurship look like among Stanford alumni when you compare Asian Americans to non-American Asians, who were enrolled at Stanford as foreign students? The Stanford Innovation Survey provides an appropriate empirical framework for examining this question. That is how our research paper originated, and it turned out to be the beginning of a productive collaborative relationship between Chuck and me. We are now working together on a number of other projects as part of the Stanford Cyber Initiative.   

What does the Stanford Innovation Survey allow you to research that other data sets do not?

One substantial challenge in studying entrepreneurship is that there is little available information about young startups and their founders. In many cases researchers therefore look at ex post entrepreneurs, who constitute a highly select population that limits what you can study; it doesn’t allow you to examine the question of who becomes an entrepreneur. While this question isn’t new to the literature, the Stanford Innovation Survey allows us to offer empirical advances in addressing it.

First, our data set comprises a representative sample of alumni regardless of whether or not one became an entrepreneur. Second, the survey’s detailed data on alumni enables us to distinguish those from entrepreneurial families as well as examine immigrants and first-generation Americans of similar ethnicity. Third, the survey allows us to examine the relatively little-explored question of how the rate of entrepreneurship changes with participation in university entrepreneurship education programs.

Thanks to the survey’s detailed demographic data, we can compare the differences in entrepreneurship both across and within ethnicity and nationality. For example, we look at how intergenerational correlation of entrepreneurship—that is, the relationship between one’s choice to become an entrepreneur and his/her parental entrepreneurship experience—differs by nationality. This question speaks to how flexible a society is to increasing entrepreneurship and how rigid the job structures are in different societies.

What are your main findings?

First, we find that, among Stanford alumni, Asian Americans are quite entrepreneurial, even more so than white Americans (with 3.3% higher startup rate), but that Asians of foreign nationality are substantially less so (they have about 12% lower entrepreneurship rate than Asian Americans). Such discrepancy also holds for investing as an angel investor or venture capitalist, or utilizing Stanford networks to find funding sources or partners. So despite the similar cultural traits that Asian subgroups may share, the societal institutions one faces and one’s upbringing create a major gap in entrepreneurship rate.

In addition, we see that non-American Asians have lower participation rates in Stanford’s entrepreneurship education programs compared to their Asian American counterparts, and that participation in these programs does little to reduce the gap in entrepreneurship rate between Asian Americans and non-American Asians. We cannot draw from this any conclusion about the value of the university’s entrepreneurship education programs. All we can say is that mere exposure to them as a student doesn’t diminish the gap in entrepreneurship between Asian Americans and non-American Asians.

Finally, we find that parental entrepreneurship status is a strong predictor of one’s decision to become an entrepreneur; that parental entrepreneurship is lowest among Asians, especially non-American Asians; and that the degree of intergenerational persistence in entrepreneurship is substantially higher among non-American Asians compared with Asian Americans. The correlation between one’s entrepreneurship status and one’s parents’ entrepreneurship experience is particularly high for East Asians (e.g., Koreans and Chinese) compared to U.S. citizens, for whom it doesn’t differ by ethnicity.

Do your findings apply in any way to populations beyond Stanford alumni?

Clearly the sample of Stanford alumni isn’t representative of the general population, but results based on it may generalize to other samples of selective-admission college-educated alumni. Moreover, Stanford does play a significant role in entrepreneurship and innovation in Silicon Valley and beyond, and understanding entrepreneurship activity among students from a research university such as ours is critical to understanding high-growth entrepreneurship and how social environments influence entrepreneurs.

What are the policy implications of your study?

First, this study speaks to the need to develop a more nuanced discourse of immigration policy. Current discussions of immigration policy are often consumed by debates about low-skilled immigrants. Our findings suggest that high-skill immigration policy should be examined and evaluated separately from low-skill immigration policy. They also suggest that we should not just narrowly look at entrepreneurship and job creation by immigrant entrepreneurs, but also consider long-run effects. We see that young Asian immigrants who grow up in the United States are significantly more entrepreneurial than Asian foreign students, despite similar educational credentials. Allowing immigrants to settle in and attain the cultural and institutional features of the American education system at a young age could therefore positively influence entrepreneurship and innovation, at least among high-skilled populations.

Second, there may be lessons here for Asian countries that are pursuing various policies to promote entrepreneurship and innovation. The low levels of parental entrepreneurship and the high intergenerational persistence in entrepreneurship that we see among non-American Asians in our sample bring to relief the underlying socio-economic constraints on entrepreneurship in Asian countries. Sending their young people for education abroad with the goal of bringing them back home isn’t enough to break out from these constraints. A different approach is to develop policies that promote transnational bridging, encouraging high-skilled Asian Americans and emigrants that choose to remain here after education to engage with their home countries.

As a senior policy advisor on the Middle East at the Pentagon and the White House, Colin Kahl has witnessed struggles in the region first-hand. From working to shape the U.S.-led campaign against the Islamic State and the long-term partnership with Iraq to limiting Iran’s nuclear activities to helping craft the U.S. response to the Arab Spring, Kahl knows better than most how important it is to understand this rapidly changing region.

Now that he has joined the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) as its inaugural Steven C. Házy Senior Fellow, Kahl wants to improve understanding of how developments in the Middle East impact people in the region and security around the globe.

The launch of FSI’s Middle East Initiative provides a first step toward this objective. As the initiative’s first director, Kahl plans to create “connective tissue” for efforts already underway across Stanford.

“There are a number of disparate efforts around campus working on Middle East issues,” said Kahl. “There is a lot of terrific research and engagement going on. My hope is that the Middle East Initiative will serve as a focal point to expose the Stanford community to ongoing work and foster new conversations that are not happening now.”

Many of the Middle East activities already occurring on campus happen at FSI, making it a natural home for the initiative.

“Our scholars are already studying the dynamics of authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, prospects for reform and democracy in the Arab world, ways to counter terrorist activities and promoting economic development,” said FSI Director Michael McFaul. “Stanford students want to dive more deeply into the region’s political, social, economic and technological development. We want to give them that opportunity.”

In the 2018-2019 academic year, FSI’s Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy plans to begin filling this need by adding a three-course sequence on the Middle East.

Kahl also plans to bring more Middle East scholars from outside Stanford to share their ideas and research.

“I look forward to helping Stanford students and scholars connect and collaborate in ways that enrich our understanding of this vital region,” said Kahl. “Stanford has much to contribute to some of the most pressing policy challenges we face.”