Population aging in Asian societies is accompanied by changes in intergenerational living arrangements, which can have substantial health and economic implications for the elderly parents and their adult children. Dr. Young Kyung Do will present some of his recent works related to elderly living arrangements in South Korea. These works include the effect of coresidence with an adult child on depressive symptoms among older widowed women; the relationship between adult children's coresidence with parents and their labor force participation; and interrelations between expectations about bequests and informal care with special emphasis on the role of intergenerational coresidence. In these studies, Dr. Do attempted to account for a common methodological issue: living arrangements are not always randomly assigned but may be jointly decided with the outcome of interest taken into account by either the elderly parents or their adult children. While this seminar will focus on the South Korean context, the significance and implications apply to many other Asian societies undergoing population aging and marked transitions in elderly living arrangements.

Dr. Young Kyung Do is an assistant professor at the Duke-National University of Singapore Graduate Medical School (Duke-NUS), Program in Health Services and Systems Research. His research interests include the economic and health system impact of population aging and noncommunicable disease; interactions between self-care, informal care, and formal care interfaces; and health, education, and labor market outcomes over the life course. He received his MD (1997) and master of public health (2003) degrees from Seoul National University, subsequently completing his PhD in Health Policy and Management (2008) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was the inaugural Asia Health Policy postdoctoral fellow at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center,(2008−9).

Speaker Bio:

Professor James T.H. Tang is Dean and Professor of Political Science, School of Social Sciences, Singapore Management University (SMU). He is a specialist in international relations with special reference to China/Hong Kong and the Asia-Pacific region. Prior to joining SMU he was Professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). A graduate of HKU, he obtained his M.Phil in International Relations at Cambridge University, and Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Professor Tang began his academic career at the National University of Singapore in 1988 where he had his first full-time academic appointment. He joined HKU in 1991 and served as Head of the Department of Politics and Public Administration (1999-2002), Dean of Social Sciences (2002-2006), and founding director of the Master of International and Public Affairs programme. Professor Tang also held visiting appointments at leading universities in China, the UK, and the US and was a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C. (2005-06). Professor Tang has published extensively in his field and serves on the editorial boards of a number of academic journals including Asian Politics and Policy, Journal of East Asian Studies, Pacific Review, Political Science and International Affairs of the Asia-Pacific. He is currently working on a project about the implications of the rise of China for international relations theory and regional governance in East Asia.

Life expectancy at aged 65 is remarkably similar in the three Chinese cities of Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Taipei, even though the cities differ in levels of socioeconomic development, health systems, and other factors. Edward Jow-Ching Tu will discuss research that aims to understand this phenomenon. Despite unprecedented increases in life expectancy and attainment of similar current levels of life expectancy, the cities differ in the contributions of changes in major causes of death to the improvements in life expectancy among the elderly. Tu and colleagues have explored several possible determinants of these different patterns and trends in the three cities, including socioeconomic development, health service delivery systems, cause-of-death classification systems, and competing risks from cardiovascular disease and other diseases. Their analysis suggests that the effect of equity of health service delivery has become more important over time.

Edward Jow-Ching Tu is a senior lecturer of demography in the Division of Social Science at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His work is focused on the impact of fertility, mortality, and migration on socio-economic changes in East Asia countries with special emphasis on nations experiencing a transition from planned economy to market economy; on causes and impacts of mortality changes and health transition on aging societies; and on the causes of lowest-low fertility in many East Asia countries. He has several active research projects ongoing in China, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. He holds graduate degress from West Virginia University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Tennessee (Knoxville). Tu has worked extensively in Asia, and has served as an adjunct professor and taught in many universities in China, including Peking University, Peoples University, Nankai Univerity, and Fudan University. He had served as a senior research scientist at the New York State Health Department and as a research fellow (full professor) at the Institute for Social Sciences and Philosophy at Academia Sinica. Tu has also taught at the State University of New York in Albany.

Ambassador Joon-woo Park, the 2011–12 Koret Fellow and a former senior diplomat from Korea, will give a historical review of Korea-Vietnam bilateral relations, including the effects of Korea's participation in the Vietnam War; bilateral relations today including diplomatic, economic and cultural exchanges; and prospects for future developments and cooperation for East Asian integration.

As a career diplomat, Ambassador Park served in numerous key posts, including those of Ambassador to the European Union and to Singapore and Presidential Advisor on Foreign Affairs. Park worked closely for over 20 years with Ban Ki-moon, the former Korean diplomat who is now the United Nations Secretary-General.

This event is made possible by the generous support from the Koret Foundation.