Stanford University

Economic Affairs

2008 Robert G. Wesson Lecture: Economic Growth, Poverty, and Democracy in Latin America--A President's Perspective

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Vicente Fox served as Constitutional President of the United Mexican States from December 1, 2000 through November 30, 2006.

Originally from Mexico City, Fox was born on July 2, 1942, the second of nine children born to José Luis Fox, a farmer, and Mercedes Quesada. When Fox was just a few days old, his family moved to the San Cristóbal Ranch in the municipality of San Francisco del Rincón, in Guanajuato state. There, Fox came into contact with the children of ejido owners and was able to gain firsthand experience of one of the problems that could be avoided in Mexico: poverty.

In 1964, he joined Coca-Cola de México as a route supervisor and, while riding aboard a delivery truck, he had the opportunity of traveling almost 2,500 routes, some of which led to the most isolated places in Mexico. This experience and his constant contact with everyday people led Fox to develop an understanding of adverse situations and, upon returning to Guanajuato, he decided to participate in the business, political, social, and educational sectors.

Whether as a business leader or politician, Fox has always sought the common good, and has constantly given his support to Mexico's people. He was President and Founder of the Amigo Daniel Children's Home Foundation; President of the Loyola Foundation; and a promoter of the León campus of the Universidad Iberoamericana, and the Lux Institute, an educational center where thousands of state residents have received training.

As part of his constant efforts to apply his business knowledge to benefit his fellow countrymen, Fox has been a Counselor of the Mexico-American Chamber of Commerce. Likewise, as Director of Grupo Fox, he has managed companies operating in the areas of agriculture, livestock breeding, agro-industry, and the production of shoes and boots for export. All of these activities have generated sources of employment.

During the 1980's, Fox began his political career by joining the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN). In 1995, he participated in the extraordinary election for the governorship of Guanajuato, and was elected by an overwhelming majority of two votes to one.

Fox was one of the first state governors to give a clear, public and timely account of the finances of Guanajuato state. He strove to promote economic development by encouraging the private sector, foreign investment, and, above all, the consolidation of small firms. In order to open up new markets, he promoted the sale of goods manufactured in Guanajuato overseas. Fox improved and broadened the state's economic infrastructure so as to attract domestic and foreign investment. He also created a unique system in which micro-credits with no overdue portfolio were granted. Under Fox's leadership, Guanajuato became the fifth largest state economy in Mexico, and in certain productive sectors, even surpassed the national average.

Fox has a great commitment to Mexico and to his desire to continue working to attain a better life for all. Thus, he has constantly traveled the country, speaking to different sectors of Mexican society. In his speeches, he commonly remarks: "I've set my heart and all my strength and determination to overcoming this challenge, and I wish this to be clearly understood. I will uphold my commitment until the very end."

In Fox's first message as Mexico's President, he stated: "I will undertake to form a plural, honest and capable government. A government that incorporates our country's very best citizens. I, Vicente Fox, give my word as a free and honest Mexican, I give my word to the nation and to history that I will do everything in my power to achieve a better future, without limits or reluctance, and with true love and passion."

Fox studied Business Administration at the Universidad Iberoamericana and Management at Harvard Business School.

This event is co-sponsored by Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Bishop Auditorium
Graduate School of Business (South)
518 Memorial Way
Stanford University

The Honorable Vicente Fox Former President of Mexico Speaker
Lectures
Robert G. Wesson Lecture Series in International Relations Theory and Practice

February 2008 Dispatch - How Autonomous Are China's Trade Unions?

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Since China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, its already cheap labor force has been exposed to global market competition. The country’s domestic employment situation, particularly with respect to guarantees of workers’ rights and interests, has likewise come under pressure. In the years from 1999 to 2002, recorded urban unemployment rates regularly increased, from 3.1 percent in 1999 and 2000, to 3.6 percent and 4.0 percent in 2001 and 2002, respectively. At the end of March 2003, they rose again to 4.1 percent. The number of labor disputes received by labor dispute arbitration committees at every level reached 184,000 by 2002, with the number of participating workers climbing to 610,000, numbers that were 19.1 percent and 30.2 percent higher, respectively, than the previous year. In short, while China’s participation in the WTO propelled economic development, trade system reform, adjustments to the economic structure, and privatization of enterprise, it also resulted in an uneasy state of affairs for labor and management relations. For instance, in October 2004, at Shenzhen’s Hong Kong-owned Meizhi Haiyan Electronics Factory, four thousand people went on strike and blockaded the roads to protest low wages.

In November 2004, amid concerns about deteriorating working conditions at foreign-funded enterprises, the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) confronted Chinese locations of WalMart, which is well known for obstructing the establishment of trade unions. The ACFTU declared: “They [WalMart] are in violation of the Trade Union Law, and we are prepared to sue them.” WalMart yielded, conceding that, “[i]f workers ask to establish a trade union, we will respect that request, [and] fulfill our duties and responsibilities under the Trade Union Law.” This landmark event demonstrated not only the ACFTU’s power in a direct confrontation, but also its opposition to the intensifying WTO-driven competition in the Chinese labor market. Thus far, the power of trade unions in general and the ACFTU in particular has been felt primarily at foreign-funded enterprises. But what about locally owned and operated enterprises?

In order to understand the actual level of autonomy that trade unions enjoy at the grassroots level, the chairmen of 1,811 trade unions in major cities and provinces—including Liaoning, Beijing, Shanghai, Zhejiang, Guangdong, Gansu, Guizhou, and Henan—completed a questionnaire survey. The Chinese Institute of Industrial Relations (Beijing) facilitated the survey, which was carried out between March 2004 and June 2006. The major findings confirm that, although the independence of trade unions at foreign-funded enterprises has increased, the unions’ autonomy at local level enterprises remains fairly low. According to survey results, China continues to be a predominantly state-corporatist system, between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on the one hand and workers and state-owned/state-held enterprises on the other.

The survey revealed other data about the leadership of China’s state-owned/state-held enterprises. Most notably, the Party organization was still appointing 24.5 percent of the chairmen of these work units. Even in cases where chairmen assumed their posts through election or open selective examinations, 35.1 percent of them participated in the election or examinations after the Party recommended them to the work unit in question (see figure 1). The ratio of chairmen who are CCP members to those who serve concurrently as a “secretary,” “vice-secretary,” or member of the Party committee at a corresponding level reached high percentages, of 90.0 percent and 46.4 percent, respectively. In addition, 72.1 percent of the chairmen of state-owned/state-held enterprises answered in the survey that their union committee had established a Party group or Party branch at their workplace. These data clearly indicate that, unlike their counterparts at foreign-funded companies, the trade unions of state-owned/state-held enterprises not only lack autonomy, and but that their management also often remains subject to Party control.

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The Shape of Things to Come: A Global Perspective on Regional Innovation Indicators

In the pursuit to assess high-tech regions' performance in and capability for innovation and entrepreneurship, a bewildering variety of data is published, including:

  • employment
  • total corporate sales
  • wages
  • venture capital funding
  • new company formation and growth of small firms
  • R&D spending
  • patents, and many more

However, on the basis of such heterogeneous indicators, it can be difficult or even impossible to compare regions. Some of this is inevitable given different perceived data needs in each region. However, perhaps a common core of data might be supplied.

To this end, the Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship is bringing together scholars and researchers from the United States, Europe and Asia to present data from their own regions that would help with comparisons between regions and linkages among them, and to make the case for what they consider the most useful set of indicators.

There will be four workshop sessions: the first will be devoted to discussing a framework for looking at entrepreneurship and innovation regional indicators, and the remaining three will take a regional focus, proposing indicators closely related to innovative regions in the United States, Europe and Asia.

This event is part of the "The Shape of Things to Come" conference at the Fisher Conference Center at Stanford University, January 17-18, 2007.

» Presentations/Papers from the event

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Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center

Workshops

Savings, Sustainability and Equity

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Kirsten finished her PhD at Stanford’s Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources in 2007. Her dissertation was entitled: Sustainability of Comprehensive Wealth – A practical and normative assessment. In a truely interdisciplinary manner, she combined economics, ethics, and engineering to improve and assess a macroeconomic sustainability indicator. She is currently a Teaching Fellow with Stanford’s Public Policy Program and a Research Associate at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. She teaches classes at the intersection of policy analysis and ethics, leads a seminar on comparative research design, and convenes a weekly environmental ethics working group. Her research interests lie in combining quantitative data with normative argument, to this end, she is co-Investigator on a Woods Institute for Environment grant working with PIs Kenneth Arrow and Debra Satz.

Prior to entering Stanford’s Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources in 2003 Kirsten worked at the World Bank for five years. Her work at the World Bank focused on the environmental impacts of infrastructure projects, remediation of industrial sites, carbon finance, compliance of projects with the World Bank’s environmental and social policies and corporate environmental strategy development. Her projects spanned the globe, including India, Kazakhstan, Dominican Republic, Peru, Colombia and Brazil. She is comfortable holding conversations over a beer or two in French, Spanish and Dutch. For two years, she served as an elected official of the World Bank’s Staff Association board, representing 8,500 staff to management on myriad issues. She won numerous awards at the World Bank and from community groups for her professional achievements and volunteer work.

Kirsten is an environmental engineer trained first at the University of Virginia (BS ‘96) and the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands (MS ’98). More recently, she completed an MS in Applied Environmental Economics from Imperial College of London (’05).

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Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Kirsten Oleson Public Policy Speaker Stanford University
Workshops
Linda Randall Meier Research Workshop on Global Justice

Conference on Healthcare Payment Incentives in the Asia Pacific

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Karen Eggleston
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The Asian health policy program is pleased to announce that a conference on "Provider Payment Incentives in the Asia Pacific" will be held November 7-8, 2008, at the China Center for Economic Research at Peking University in Beijing, P.R. China.

Organizers of the conference include health economists at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University; the China Center for Economic Research at Peking University; Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management Department of Economics; and Seoul National University School of Public Health.

We welcome empirical and theoretical research analyzing how reimbursement incentives shape health and healthcare behavior in the economies of the Asia Pacific. We especially welcome evaluations of policy reforms and natural experiments impacting health service provider incentives. The papers can examine payment incentives in one country, region, or healthcare setting, or include comparative analysis of two or more regions in the Asia Pacific.

Please email papers or extended abstracts (about 500 words) to Karen Eggleston. The submissions deadline is June 1, 2008. The selection committee will notify authors by July 1, 2008.

We also encourage inquiries from researchers that may have access to relevant payment reform data but are interested in support regarding their research design or analytic methods. We will work with you to identify appropriate collaborators and possible financial support for completing the research.

Authors of papers selected for presentation will receive partial subsidy for their participation in the conference as well as opportunity to publish their research in a special volume through the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University or in a special issue of an English-language health policy journal.

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John Hagel and Henry Chesbrough deliver keynote addresses at "The Shape of Things to Come" conference

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George Krompacky
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"The Shape of Things to Come," a conference presented by the Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship on January 17-18, 2008, featured keynotes by John Hagel, co-author of The Only Sustainable Edge and Co-Chairman of the Deloitte Center for Edge Innovation, and Dr. Henry Chesbrough, Executive Director of the Center for Open Innovation at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and author of Open Innovation.

The keynotes bookended Thursday's forum, "New Patterns and Paradigms in Global Innovation Networks," and were a prelude to Friday's academic workshop, "A Global Perspective on Regional Innovation Indicators." Hagel's talk focused on the need for a more explicit taxonomy of innovative collaboration and discussed the "huge need to define pragmatic migration paths"--routes that the average manager and company can take to reach the opportunities that normally are only accessible to cutting-edge companies.

The forum closed with a presentation by Dr. Henry Chesbrough, who provided an overview on the globalization of innovation in the Chinese semiconductor industry, which he sees as split into a "globally oriented, globally competitive" industry segment and a domestically-oriented segment with "backward technologies" and lacking access to capital. The question, he explained, is how China will shift its resources, now entrenched in the latter, to the former, competitive segment.

Chesbrough finished with a discussion of intellectual property rights (IPR) in China, looking at flows of knowledge and current IPR challenges; he mentioned some surprising developments--the rise of businesses to "promote the legal exchange of IP" and the growth of a domestic constituency for stronger IPR--and discussed future implications for IPR in China.

In between the keynotes, the forum featured sessions on innovation in internet services in China, the role of venture capital as a network builder, and discussions on two rapidly moving industries: cleantech and thin film transistor LCD displays.

Conference materials, including presentations and audio files, will be made available on the SPRIE website.

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Los Trabajos de la Literatura

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Bernardo Atxaga (José Irazu Garmendia, Asteasu, Guipúzcoa, 1951) pertenece al grupo de escritores que empezó a publicar en lengua vasca a principios de los años setenta. Se graduó en Ciencias Económicas en la Facultad de Bilbao (1973). Posteriormente, realizó estudios de Filosofía en la Universidad de Barcelona (1980-1983).

Publicó su primer libro, la novela corta Ziutateaz, en 1976. Le siguió, en 1978, el libro de poemas Etiopia. A partir de entonces ha publicado con asiduidad, cultivando diversos géneros. Entre sus obras más importantes pueden citarse las siguientes: Obabakoak (1988); Gizona bere bakardadean (1993) -publicada en castellano con el título de El hombre solo (1994)-; Zeru horiek (1995), Esos cielos (1996)-; Poemas & Híbridos (1990); Groenlandiako lezioa (1998), Lista de locos (1998); Soinujolearen semea (2003), El hijo del acordeonista (2004).

En el ámbito de la literatura infantil y juvenil, cabe destacar los siguientes títulos: Behi euskaldun baten memoriak (1991), Memorias de una vaca (1992) Sara izeneko gizona (1996), Un espía llamado Sara (1996); Xola eta lehoiak, Shola y los leones(1995); Bambulo (1998).

Ha publicado artículos y textos literarios en diversas publicaciones de todo el mundo: El País, El Mundo, El Correo, The New York Times, The Guardian, Corriere della Sera, El Paseante, Matador, Vuelta, Die Horen, Lichtungen, Lyrikkklubbss Bibliotek, Linea d ómbra, La Main du Singe, Le Serpent à Plumes, La Femelle du Requin, Tabacaria, Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry London, Revue Labyrint, Threepenny Review etc.

Premio de la Crítica en diversas ocasiones; Premio Euskadi, Premio Nacional de Literatura, Prix Millepages, finalista en dos ocasiones en European Literary Award, Premio Cesare Pavese etc.

Su obra ha sido traducida y publicada en 30 lenguas.

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Bernardo Atxaga belongs to a group of writers who began to publish in the Basque language at the beginning of the 1970's. He graduated with a degree in Economics from the Facultad de Bilbao in 1973. Later, he completed his studies in Philosophy at the University of Barcelona (1980 - 1983). He published his first book, the short novel Ziutateaz, in 1976, followed by Etiopia, a book of poems, in 1978. Since then, he has published prolifically and developed a varity of styles. Among his most important works are: Obabakoak (1988); Gizona bere bakardadean (1993) -published in Castilian and titled El hombre solo (1994)-; Zeru horiek (1995), Esos cielos (1996)-; Poemas & Híbridos (1990); Groenlandiako lezioa (1998), Lista de locos (1998); Soinujolearen semea (2003), and El hijo del acordeonista (2004).

In the world of emerging young literature, the following titles of Mr. Atxaga are worth noting: Behi euskaldun baten memoriak (1991), Memorias de una vaca (1992) Sara izeneko gizona (1996), Un espía llamado Sara (1996); Xola eta lehoiak, Shola y los leones (1995); Bambulo (1998).

He has published articles and literary texts in many publications around the world, including: El País, El Mundo, El Correo, The New York Times, The Guardian, Corriere della Sera, El Paseante, Matador, Vuelta, Die Horen, Lichtungen, Lyrikkklubbss Bibliotek, Linea d ómbra, La Main du Singe, Le Serpent à Plumes, La Femelle du Requin, Tabacaria, Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry London, Revue Labyrint, Threepenny Review etc.

Atxaga has won many awards including the Premio de la Critica on many occasions, the Premio Euskadi, Premio Nacional de Literatura, Prix Millpages, and he was a finalist on two occasions for the European Literary Award.

His works have been translated and published in 30 languages.

 

German Studies Library
Building 260, Room 252 (Pigott Hall)
Stanford University

Bernardo Atxaga Author Speaker
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