FSI researchers strive to understand how countries relate to one another, and what policies are needed to achieve global stability and prosperity. International relations experts focus on the challenging U.S.-Russian relationship, the alliance between the U.S. and Japan and the limitations of America’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.
Foreign aid is also examined by scholars trying to understand whether money earmarked for health improvements reaches those who need it most. And FSI’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center has published on the need for strong South Korean leadership in dealing with its northern neighbor.
FSI researchers also look at the citizens who drive international relations, studying the effects of migration and how borders shape people’s lives. Meanwhile FSI students are very much involved in this area, working with the United Nations in Ethiopia to rethink refugee communities.
Trade is also a key component of international relations, with FSI approaching the topic from a slew of angles and states. The economy of trade is rife for study, with an APARC event on the implications of more open trade policies in Japan, and FSI researchers making sense of who would benefit from a free trade zone between the European Union and the United States.
This unit provides students with an introduction to human rights, minority (both ethnic and religious) rights, civil and political rights, and women's rights.
Bechtel Conference Center
Bechtel Conference Center
Bechtel Conference Center
Bechtel Conference Center
In this book Takeo Hoshi and Anil Kashyap examine the history of the Japanese financial system, from its nineteenth-century beginnings through the collapse of the 1990s that concluded with sweeping reforms. Combining financial theory with new data and original case studies, they show why the Japanese financial system developed as it did and how its history affects its ongoing evolution.
The authors describe four major periods within Japan's financial history and speculate on the fifth, into which Japan is now moving. Throughout, they focus on four questions: How do households hold their savings? How is business financing provided? What range of services do banks provide? And what is the nature and extent of bank involvement in the management of firms? The answers provide a framework for analyzing the history of the past 150 years, as well as implications of the just-completed reforms known as the "Japanese Big Bang."
Hoshi and Kashyap show that the largely successful era of bank dominance in postwar Japan is over, largely because deregulation has exposed the banks to competition from capital markets and foreign competitors. The banks are destined to shrink as households change their savings patterns and their customers continue to migrate to new funding sources. Securities markets are set to re-emerge as central to corporate finance and governance.
"This book is a fascinating analysis of the past, present, and future of the Japanese financial system. It sheds a great deal of light on Japan's current troubles and their potential solution."
-Ben S. Bernanke, Howard Harrison and Gabrielle Snyder Beck Professor of Economics and Public Affairs, Princeton University
"Hoshi and Kashyap crystallize much of their high-quality research in this book. Corporate Financing and Government in Japan tells of the rise and fall of banking dominance over Japanese corporations with historical accounts, economic theory, and summaries of empirical analysis. The book will be an authoritative read for a wide-ranging audience, including college students, MBA students, and scholars in the field."
-Takatoshi Ito, Professor, Hitotsubashi University
Some of the most pressing issues in the contemporary international order revolve around a frequently invoked but highly contested concept: sovereignty. To what extent does the concept of sovereignty -as it plays out in institutional arrangements, rules, and principles -inhibit the solution of these issues? Can the rules of sovereignty be bent? Can they be ignored? Do they represent an insurmountable barrier to stable solutions or can alternative arrangements be created? Problematic Sovereignty attempts to answer these and other fundamental questions by taking account of the multiple, sometimes contradictory, components of the concept of sovereignty in cases ranging from the struggle for sovereignty between China and Taiwan to the compromised sovereignty of Bosnia under the Dayton Accord.
Countering the common view of sovereignty that treats it as one coherent set of principles, the chapters of Problematic Sovereignty illustrate cases where the disaggregation of sovereignty has enabled political actors to create entities that are semiautonomous, semi-independent, and/or semilegal in order to solve specific problems stemming from competing claims to authority.
How was it that Afghanistan, a country that was often conquered and ruled by outsiders before 1800, became seemingly impossible to conquer and rule in the 19th and 20th centuries? An historical examination of Afghan history reveals that premodern Central Asian rulers looked upon war and conquest as the business of displacing rival elites, a process having little or nothing to do with the inhabitants of the territory. During the 19th century, this pattern began to change in Afghanistan where governments found themselves dependent on raising tribal armies to repel foreign invaders, such as the British, at the cost of sharing power with them in the postwar period. This pattern continued into the 20th century when during each period of state collapse drew an ever-wider part of the population into the political struggle for power. The Soviet invasion drew the widest possible opposition but upon their withdrawal no faction was able to create a stable government. Afghanistan fell into ten years of civil war that opened it up to extreme movements such the Taliban and its exploitation by outsiders such as Osama bin Laden. Since war alone has now proved incapable of solving Afghanistan's problems the current conflict in Afghanistan can only be won by a wider policy that makes Afghanistan's economic and political reconstruction a priority in a way that can end its cycle of anarchy.
Philippines Conference Room, Encina Hall, Third Floor, Central Wing
In recent years, Korea has seen remarkable developments in the broadband Internet access business. This presentation looks into what Korea's broadband Internet usage is like now in comparison with other countries, and explains the major factors contributing to such development from three viewpoints: government, private sector, and social backgrounds. The seminar will also include discussing challenges that the Korean broadband Internet industry is facing: how to convert high usage of Internet to e-business, and strategic issues from a broadband Internet service provider's standpoint. This program is free and open to the public. Lunch will be provided for those who **RSVP before noon on Wednesday, March 6th** to Okky Choi. Tel: (650) 724-8271 or Email: okkychoi@stanford.edu
Encina Hall, Central Wing, third floor, Philippines Conference Room