Despite all of the rhetoric, it is clear from the numbers that China's ascendency has not been at the expense of the United States.

-Thomas Fingar

China unquestionably occupies a significant place in the world's U.S.-led economic and political system. Will it continue to participate in the system that it has benefited from and contributed to, adapting its policies and practices in order to do so? Or, will it attempt to overturn the current system at some point in an effort to gain global dominance? Thomas Fingar, the Oksenberg/Rohlen Distinguished Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, will address these core questions in a new research project, arguing that the situation is neither so polarized, nor so simplistic. Former chairman of the National Intelligence Council, Fingar takes an empirical approach to his research, examining whether there have been recurring patterns to China's involvement in the global order; what drives, shapes, and constrains Chinese initiatives; and how others have responded to Chinese actions.

Fingar asserts that there have been patterns to China's participation in international economics and politics over the past 30 years, including a pendular quality to the U.S.-China relationship. According to him, relations between the two countries were largely instrumental during the Cold War era when the United States was at odds with the Soviet Union and China was undergoing a period of self strengthening. U.S.-China relations cooled following the Tiananmen Square incident, the timing of which coincided roughly with the fall of the Soviet Union. Trust between the two countries deteriorated as China displayed its more authoritarian side, and the United States responded with sanctions that did not significantly impede China's economic growth, but did change the relationship in ways that still shape perceptions of one another.

Economics are now the primary focal point of discussions about U.S.-China relations, with a negative light frequently cast on China. "Despite all of the rhetoric, it is clear from the numbers that China's ascendency has not been at the expense of the United States," states Fingar. Trade with China, in fact, creates jobs in the United States, but trade-related jobs are dispersed and therefore not clearly visible. "They are not concentrated in a place where a factory closed, often for reasons that that have nothing to do with China," says Fingar, "but the pain and the political impact is local. I would predict that when our economy turns around, the pendulum will swing further back in a less-worried, less-critical direction."

While China has a legal system and has adopted many international standards, Fingar asserts that "it is still not a society governed by law," and that it in fact does not always measure up to global or even to its own standards. He cites China's record of undesirable practices and issues, such as currency manipulation, government corruption, and intellectual property violation, which complicate and confuse understanding of its involvement in the global system.

Fingar does not believe that the U.S.-China relationship will ever return to the "honeymoon" era of the Cold War, but he says, "The swings of the pendulum and the perturbations in the relationship are less intense and of shorter duration; that is the pattern." Quoting Anne-Marie Slaughter, director of policy planning at the U.S. Department of State, Fingar suggests that the best vision for the global order is "a world in which there are more partnerships and fewer alliances." He cautions against disregarding important, long-time alliances, such as the U.S.-Korea relationship. He notes, however, the crucial fact that alliances assume that there is an adversary, which can marginalize and threaten regional neighbors, such as China, or put allies in the uncomfortable position of having to choose between siding with a neighbor or a distant ally. "We must find a way so that no one has to choose," says Fingar.

On January 6, Fingar outlined the primary points of his new research project at a public lecture co-sponsored by the Stanford China Program and the Center for East Asian Studies, part of the China in the World series. He will also lead Stanford students through an examination of related key issues and questions in "China on the World Stage" (IPS 246), a course that he is teaching during the current winter quarter.

An October 13 New York Times headline article warned that an increasing volatile market for grains could lead to a repeat of the 2008 food price run-up. That price spike left over 1 billion people in a state of food insecurity-a threshold symbolic in its extreme order of magnitude and in the challenges it presents for combating global hunger in the future. In a paper released December 20 in Population and Development Review FSE director Rosamond L. Naylor and deputy director Walter P. Falcon provide insight into the causes and consequences of these volatile events.

"Price variability, particularly spikes, has enormous impacts on the rural poor who spend a majority of their income on food and have minimal savings," said Naylor. "Impacts at the local level have not been well measured, yet are key to improving food security globally." 

Expectations--often faulty--have played a key role in price volatility over the past decade. Uncertain exchange rates and macro policies added to price misperceptions, as did flurries of speculative activity in organized futures markets, particularly as a result of the growing biofuels market.

"These events highlight new linkages between agriculture-energy and agriculture-finance markets that affect the world food economy today," explained Falcon. "More importantly, volatile markets compound problems of low crop productivity, increase reliance on food imports, and aggravate other internal causes of instability--conflict, weak institutions, and inadequate infrastructure--that typically plague the world's poorest countries."

To see how the rural poor were impacted on a local scale, Naylor and Falcon looked at Ghana, Uganda, Malawi, Guatemala, and India. Price changes at the local level during the 2008 price spike were frequently half that of international prices, primarily as a consequence of domestic food and trade policies.

"The price bubble was undeniably grim for poor consumers, particularly for households living under $1/day or $2/day, but not as debilitating as many commentators suggested," said Falcon. "Unfortunately, most price stabilization efforts aimed at the poor, however well intended, ended up helping larger net producers much more than those at the margin."

Additionally, domestic self-sufficiency polices tended to have long-term negative impacts on the international market when governments lacked the resources to defend a targeted price or were ‘large actors' with significant shares of global production or consumption.

For example, in the spring of 2008, the Indian government placed a ban on rice exports--a major staple in the country--when it feared significant increases in grain prices and a spread of Ug99 (wheat rust). This ban affected food prices from Asia to Africa, created mini-panics within food importing countries, and added to global grain price variability. It underscored the growing food-security and crop interdependencies among nations arising from pathogens, prices, and policies.

The extreme heat wave that hit Russia and Eastern Europe in the summer of 2010, coupled with floods in Pakistan, declining estimates of maize stocks in the U.S., and uncertainties about global GDP growth have captured the attention of many analysts and policymakers. What will happen to prices in terms of spikes, trends, and variations during 2011-2013 and beyond is uncertain.

What is known, said Naylor, is that the causes and consequences of food-price variability deserve much more attention if we are going to alleviate global food insecurity in the future.

President Obama and members of his national security team — including Stanford's Michael A. McFaul, senior advisor on Russia and former Deputy Director of FSI and Director of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law — gather in the Oval Office to celebrate Senate approval of the new START Treaty. Signed in April by President Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, the treaty was ultimately approved 71/26 in the Senate. The treaty will reduce deployed warheads and missile launchers, and restore mutual verification procedures, and is regarded as one more step toward the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons.

David Lobell will be giving two talks this week at the AGU fall meeting:

Towards accurate models of global crop-climate interactions

This talk will provide a brief overview of the major links between climate and crops that are most in need of representation in global models. The talk will then focus on one of the key links - the effect of climate variation on crop productivity across a range of cropping systems and regions. I will present some recent work to use historical datasets to build statistical models at the scale of individual countries. The effects of different datasets and modeling assumption will be explored, to identify areas where statistical models provide robust representation of crop responses to climate. A sample application of these models - estimating the net regional and global impacts of recent trends in climate - will be presented.

Assessing the future of crop yield variability in the United States with downscaled climate projections

One aspect of climate change of particular concern to farmers and food markets is the potential for increased year-to-year variability in crop yields. Recent episodes of food price increases following the Australian drought or Russian heat wave have heightened this concern. Downscaled climate projections that properly capture the magnitude of daily and interannual variability of weather can be useful for projecting future yield variability. Here we examine the potential magnitude and cause of changes in variability of corn yields in the United States up to 2050. Using downscaled climate projections from multiple models, we estimate a distribution of changes in mean and variability of growing season average temperature and precipitation. These projections are then fed into a model of maize yield that explicitly factors in the effect of extremely warm days. Changes in yield variability can result from a shift in mean temperatures coupled with a nonlinear crop response, a shift in climate variability, or a combination of the two. The results are decomposed into these different causes, with implications for future research to reduce uncertainties in projections of future yield variability.

The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University has awarded six seed grants in the first round of funding from the Global Underdevelopment Action Fund. The grants are intended to jumpstart early-stage multidisciplinary research projects that tackle persistent problems of global underdevelopment. The Action Fund, which is supported by expendable gifts from FSI donors, matching funds from the Office of the President, and FSI, grew out of the Institute's spring 2010 conference on Technology, Governance, and Global Development, which featured keynote speaker Bill Gates, together with leaders from business, government, and nonprofit organizations, the media, and the academic community, to examine novel integrative approaches to poverty alleviation and human development around the world. The Action Fund projects range across disciplines, focusing primarily on problems in developing and transitioning societies. The majority of the projects have a health dimension, reflecting the degree to which poor health outcomes mirror a country's development status.

"Stanford is uniquely placed among American universities to bring cutting edge research to bear on practical problems of development.  No other institution has lower barriers to multidisciplinary work.  The Action Fund award recipients are drawn from many different parts of the university but united in their concern for promoting development," said Stephen D. Krasner,  the Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations, Senior Associate Dean of the Social Sciences at H&S, and deputy director of FSI.

Six multidisciplinary research teams led by Stanford faculty from across the university will receive a total of $236,000 in seed grants. The projects were selected by a faculty committee chaired by Stephen Krasner, with a focus on early-stage, multidisciplinary, policy-relevant research. All, projects are required to have a training component for Stanford undergraduate or graduate students.

The award-winning projects and their principal investigators are:

• Explaining and Improving U.S. Global Health Financing
  Eran Bendavid, assistant professor of medicine and affiliate in FSI’s Center for Health Policy. Co-investigator: Rajaie Batniji, postdoctoral fellow, Department of Medicine. With a sharp divergence between justifications for global health funding and the countries and diseases to which funding is disbursed, this study will conduct a quantitative analysis of the determinants of U.S. financing for the 171 countries receiving development assistance for health in 2009. The project seeks to identify the key drivers for U.S. global health financing by country and facilitate research on how to make global health financing work better. 
• Peasants into Democrats: Evaluating the Impact of Information on Local Governance in Mali
  James D. Fearon, professor of political science. Co-investigator and trainee: Jessica Gottlieb, PhD student in political science. Recent research suggests that enhancing voter information holds promise for increasing government accountability in new democracies. This project will undertake a field experiment in Mali, a model of an underperforming new democracy, to test the theory that information that sufficiently raises citizen voter expectations of government performance can have an important effect on governance. It will examine the impact of an intervention that provides citizens with a civics course on voter and government behavior.
  
• Effects of “Best Buy Health and Nutrition Toolkit” for Improving Educational Outcomes in Rural China
  Scott Rozelle, FSI Senior Fellow. Co-investigator and trainee: Paul H. Wise, professor of pediatrics, FSI senior fellow, and Patricia Foo, MD/PhD student, economics. Studies show high levels of anemia, nearsightedness, intestinal worms, and poor health and sanitation among children in China’s rural boarding schools. This project will measure initial health and nutrition levels of students in a randomized control setting, and deploy a set of affordable and sustainable interventions in treatment schools that includes multivitamins, eyeglasses, deworming medication, and nutrition and sanitation training. The project will then assess what works and what does not by comparing improvements in academic performance in treatment and control groups. The results of this experiment are intended to inform education and nutrition policy in China at the central and provincial levels.
  
• Controlling Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis: A Cooperative Agenda for China and North Korea
  Gary K. Schoolnik, professor of medicine and microbiology and immunology, and FSI senior fellow. Co-investigator: Sharon Perry, senior research scientist, Department of Medicine and FSI/CISAC. Rates of tuberculosis, a disease that thrives on poverty, malnutrition, and interrupted medical care, are now among the highest in the world in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, North Korea), elevating the risk of an epidemic of drug-resistant strains and a spread into China. This project represents a unique historical opportunity to examine the relationship between food security, malnutrition, and the epidemiology of tuberculosis in a present-day famine.

  
• Political Causes of Russia’s Public Health Crisis
  Kathryn Stoner, FSI senior fellow. Co-investigator: Rajaie Batniji, postdoctoral fellow, Department of Medicine. In spite of the economic advances and increases in GDP since the collapse of communism, Russia suffers from a range of dismal public health outcomes reminiscent of a much poorer country. This study seeks to understand what role political factors play in the country’s high adult mortality rate and declining life expectancy by mining World Bank and World Health Organization data and examining how Russians access healthcare services and information

  
• Factors Affecting Adoption and Ongoing Use of Improved Biomass Stoves in Karnataka and Maharashtra, India
  Frank Wolak, professor of economics and FSI senior fellow. Co-investigator: Mark C. Thurber, research scholar, FSI/Program on Energy and Sustainable Development. Burning of biomass in traditional stoves is associated with a host of ills among an estimated 2.5 billion people around the world, even though cleaner and more efficient technologies exist that could mitigate the problems. This study will examine what factors affect cooking mode choice and utilization, with the objective of developing an econometric model that is useful for efforts that encourage the adoption of improved biomass stoves. The project also seeks to offer insights on poorly understood processes of technology adoption among poor populations and to understand the magnitude of health, development, and environmental benefits that might be achievable.