Stanford University

International Development

FSI researchers consider international development from a variety of angles. They analyze ideas such as how public action and good governance are cornerstones of economic prosperity in Mexico and how investments in high school education will improve China’s economy.

They are looking at novel technological interventions to improve rural livelihoods, like the development implications of solar power-generated crop growing in Northern Benin.

FSI academics also assess which political processes yield better access to public services, particularly in developing countries. With a focus on health care, researchers have studied the political incentives to embrace UNICEF’s child survival efforts and how a well-run anti-alcohol policy in Russia affected mortality rates.

FSI’s work on international development also includes training the next generation of leaders through pre- and post-doctoral fellowships as well as the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program.

Research Presentation (2 of 4) - Ishii, Moronaga and Takinami

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In this session of the Shorenstein APARC Corporate Affiliate Visiting Fellows Research Presentations, the following will be presented:

Wataru Ishii, "Promotion of Tourism in Japan:  Policies and Plans for Development and Involvement of Local Institutions"

Tourism is an industry that covers a lot of areas, such as hotels, transportation, food services and one of a few industries where growth can be expected in the future.  Because of the economic importance of tourism, the Japanese National Government established the Japan Tourism Agency in 2008 and has begun to try to make Japan "Tourism Nation" and local governments are following suit.  Ishii studies the significance of tourism in Japan and policies to attract foreign tourists that will compensate for stagnant domestic tourists.

Yuichi Moronaga, "The Essential Value - Connecting and Sharing Emotions - Storytelling in the Social Media Era"

Customers have high expectations when making purchases.  They expect products to provide value and, at the same time, satisfy their sense of emotions.  Storytelling is an important factor when it comes to these customer purchases.  Knowing the story behind the product or company can create strong attachments and this "essential value" is an important factor in the buying cycle.  These emotions may encourage our next behavior, whether it's repeat buying or long-term usage.  With the increased usage of social media, this type of cycle that is created is vital for a company's marketing plan as well as providing increased motivation of a company's employees.  In this presentation, Moronaga shares examples of storytelling, demonstrating how dynamically storytelling is changing people's purchasing behaviors and the opportunities presented.

Hirofumi Takinami, "Political Economy of the Financial Crises in Japan and the United States:  Why the Difference in Speed to Respond and Recover?"

Within the last two decades, the United States and Japan each experienced the same type of financial crisis, notably triggered by the collapse of major financial institutions.  Both were under the political economic conditions of one of the largest economies in the world as well as of an advanced democratic country.  However, it is symbolically different that Japan let the institutions go into chain-reaction bankruptcies without injecting public money in 1997, while the U.S. undertook a bailout of AIG just after the Lehman bankruptcy in 2008.  And now the U.S. economy is showing earlier recovery compared to what Japan experienced. -- What made this difference in speed to respond and recover?  To explain this puzzle, Takinami focuses on (a) existence of precedent & learning, (b) speed and process of economic downturn toward the crisis, (c) action by national leader & secretarial organization, and (d) status of global standard setter, together with assessing the alternative explanations.  Then, he argues some implications of these analyses.

Philippines Conference Room

Wataru Ishii Speaker Shizuoka Prefecture
Yuichi Moronaga Speaker Ministry of Economy, Trade & Industry, Japan
Hirofumi Takinami Speaker MInistry of Finance, Japan
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Sweetening biofuel production

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David Lobell
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Sugarcane - a principal crop for biofuel - reduces the local air temperature compared to pasturelands or fields growing soybeans or maize, according to a new study from researchers at Stanford University and the Carnegie Institution for Science. But sugarcane's effect on temperature is a "double-edged machete," as it increases ambient temperatures compared with natural vegetation.

These small local changes should be taken into consideration in studies of global climate change, the researchers said.

The researchers looked at changes in vegetation in the Brazilian Cerrado - a vast tropical savanna lying south of the Amazon basin - large areas of which have been converted from natural vegetation to agriculture in recent decades.

Increasingly, these existing agricultural areas are now being converted to sugarcane for use in biofuel production. Brazil is now second only to the United States in ethanol production, much of which is used domestically.

What the effect on global climate would be if sugarcane farming were to expand significantly is not yet clear, said David Lobell, an assistant professor in environmental Earth system science at Stanford and center fellow at the Program on Food Security and the Environment.

"The temperature changes are happening locally, where the land-use change is happening," Lobell said. "It does not seem to spill over into other countries, for example, at least as far as we can tell right now."

But Lobell said sugarcane growing in the Cerrado is definitely expanding and given that the region encompasses approximately 1.9 million square kilometers (733,000 square miles) - an area larger than Alaska - the potential exists for a globally significant effect.

Using maps and data from hundreds of satellite images, the researchers calculated the temperature, the amount of water given off and how much light was reflected rather than absorbed for each of the different types of vegetation. They found that compared to land cultivated with other annual crops, sugarcane reduced the local air temperature by an average of 0.93 degrees Celsius (1.67 F).

But compared to the natural vegetation of the Cerrado - mainly grass and shrubs - the sugarcane fields warmed the ambient air by 1.55 C (2.79 F).

Lobell said the bulk of the temperature difference is due to evapotranspiration - the moisture released to the air through the leaves of the plants and the soil. Most of the land put into sugarcane had previously been converted from natural vegetation to pastureland, said Scott Loarie, a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie. "If someone has a farm that once was natural vegetation, that transition to pasture and annual crops caused local warming," he said. "So now as the farm is going to sugarcane, by comparison it is cooling temperatures locally."

Their research, Direct Impacts on Local Climate of Sugarcane Expansion in Brazil, is described in the current issue of Nature Climate Change.

This local cooling does not necessarily mean that the global climate is cooling as a result. It depends in part on what happens with the agriculture that was displaced by the sugarcane, Loarie said. For example, if cattle used to graze on a tract of land and some Amazon forest is cut down to provide new pasture for them, net carbon emissions will actually increase.

"You might not make any difference as far as cooling the world globally at all; in fact, you might make the world marginally warmer," he said.

"The global implications of these local effects were not a part of this study, and any discussion of mitigating global climate should consider the potential for these land use cascades."

One of the important aspects of the study, Lobell said, is that it demonstrates how satellite data can be used in real time to understand the effects of environmental changes. Most research studying the impact of biofuel use on climate has been done with computer modeling.

"I think the coolest thing about this study is you actually can see these temperature effects happening already," Lobell said. "In terms of the more general point about bio energy, I think it is another good example of why looking only at greenhouse gases is not the full picture."

Another takeaway from the study, Loarie said, is that the temperature findings support the existing rule of thumb that biofuel crops are best located on land that is already used for agriculture. That general guideline stems from the fact that there is less carbon released to the atmosphere by converting land where the existing vegetation contains low amounts of carbon, such as pasture or crops, than by cutting down the dense, carbon-rich forests in the Amazon.

Loarie said that while the study clearly showed that planting sugarcane moves the temperature closer to what it would have been if the natural vegetation had not been removed from the land, that doesn't mean the land is any closer to its natural state in other respects.

"Converting pasture to sugarcane is definitely not ecological restoration," said Chris Field, a professor of biology and of environmental Earth system science, who was involved in the research.

"Still, the direct effect on climate is potentially important enough to play a role in future decisions about land use and land management in large parts of the tropics," he said.

The study was funded by the Stanford University Global Climate and Energy Project.

Greg Asner, a professor, by courtesy, of environmental Earth system science, is a coauthor of the paper. Lobell is also a center fellow at both the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Woods Institute for the Environment. Field is also a senior fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy and at the Woods Institute, and director of the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution.

 

 

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Research Presentations (1 of 4) - Kadowaki, Sato and Vasudeva

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In this session of the Shorenstein APARC Corporate Affiliate Visiting Fellows Research Presentations, the following will be presented:

Toshifumi Kadowaki, "The Keys to Successful M&As in High-Tech Industries - Based on a Study of the HP-Compaq Merger"

Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) are tactics, not strategy.  Successful M&As, however, can be considered one of the most useful tactics in realizing corporate strategy because M&As often save time and can even save money and reduce risk.  Many high-tech companies, therefore, have made a large number of M&As recently.  Numerous empirical studies, though, have shown that most M&As fail. Through the case study of the Hewlett Packard-Compaq merger, Kadowaki analyzes what makes M&As successful and what causes them to fail.

Oshie Sato, "Dawn of a new Era in the Video Industry - Impact of Smart TVs from a Historical Perspective of Broadcasting and Movie Industries in the United States and Japan"

After prospering for more than a half century both in the United States and Japan, the broadcasting and movie industries have reached a turning point of their business models.  This is due mostly to the rise of competition with the Internet since the late 1990s and a global recession led by Lehman's fall in 2008.  What will happen to these industries in the U.S. and Japan over the next decade?  Sato analyzes a future picture of the broadcasting and movie industries, focusing on the impact of smart TVs - next-generation video devices such as Google TV and Apple TV.

Sonya Vasudeva, "Pharmacogenetics in Cancer:  Steps Towards Personalized Medicine"

The variability in clinical response to drug treatment has been well known for decades.  An era of pharmacogenetics started almost fifty years ago when it was recognized that a part of this variation is inherited, and can therefore be predictable.  With the wealth of information readily available online, the promise of personalized medicine looms large, but the generalization into clinical applications of pharmacogenomics has been more challenging.  In Vasudeva's research, she shares examples of tests, which are integrated by USA FDA and EMA into drug lables, one example being K Ras mutation for metastatic colorectal cancer.  Vasudeva argues that the increased availability of such tests may transform the field of medical oncology, moving treatment from the "one size fits all" approach to a personalized therapy based on variations in an individual genome.

Philippines Conference Room

Toshifumi Kadowaki Speaker Sumitomo Corporation
Oshie Sato Speaker Sumitomo Corporation
Sonya Vasudeva Speaker Reliance Industries
Seminars

Entrepreneurship and Japan's Transformation

Brochure for STAJE April conference

The meeting will bring together over 30 scholars on Japan to discuss new developments in Japan, including potential opportunities opening up after the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake. We will have 22 paper presenters and discussants, with topics ranging from new firm profitability, the politics of firm creation, management of innovation, and large firm entrepreneurial processes in Japan. The goal is to lead to a better understanding of the nature of entrepreneurship, and how analyses of Japan might inform more theoretical discussions.

Also, in view of the disastrous earthquake and tsunami that has recently afflicted Japan, the conference will feature a panel of prominent experts on Japan's economic, social systems, business, and government who will discuss the effects of the great earthquake on research and today's Japan.

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Stanford Project on Japanese Entrepreneurship (STAJE)

Direct Impacts on Local Climate of Sugarcane Expansion in Brazil

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The increasing global demand for biofuels will require conversion of conventional agricultural or natural ecosystems. Expanding biofuel production into areas now used for agriculture reduces the need to clear natural ecosystems, leading to indirect climate benefits through reduced greenhouse-gas emissions and faster payback of carbon debts. Biofuel expansion may also cause direct, local climate changes by altering surface albedo and evapotranspiration, but these effects have been poorly documented. Here we quantify the direct climate effects of sugar-cane expansion in the Brazilian Cerrado, on the basis of maps of recent sugar-cane expansion and natural-vegetation clearance combined with remotely sensed temperature, albedo and evapotranspiration over a 1.9 million km2 area. On a regional basis for clear-sky daytime conditions, conversion of natural vegetation to a crop/pasture mosaic warms the cerrado by an average of 1.55 (1.45-1.65) °C, but subsequent conversion of that mosaic to sugar cane cools the region by an average of 0.93 (0.78-1.07) °C, resulting in a mean net increase of 0.6 °C. Our results indicate that expanding sugar cane into existing crop and pasture land has a direct local cooling effect that reinforces the indirect climate benefits of this land-use option.

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Nature Climate Change
Authors
David Lobell
Gregory P. Asner
Christopher B. Field
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Shorenstein APARC announces three new political economy titles

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Economic development is a dynamic process in East and Southeast Asia, and one that is inextricably tied to policy.

Two new groundbreaking political economy publications are now available from the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC), and a third is forthcoming in August.

Going Private in China: The Politics of Corporate Restructuring and System Reform, addresses many key reform questions faced over the past two decades by China, as well as by Japan and South Korea. Edited by Stanford China Program director Jean C. Oi, this volume demonstrates the commonalities between three seemingly disparate political economies. In addition, it sheds important new light on China's corporate restructuring and also offers new perspectives on how we think about the process of institutional change.

In Spending Without Taxation: FILP and the Politics of Public Finance in Japan, former Shorenstein Fellow Gene Park demonstrates how the Japanese government established and mobilized the Fiscal Investment Loan Program (FILP), which drew on postal savings, public pensions, and other funds to pay for its priorities and reduce demands on the budget. Referring to FILP as a "distinctive postwar political bargain," he posits that it has had lasting political and economic effects. Park's book not only provides a close examination of FILP, but it also resolves key debates in Japanese politics and demonstrates that governments can finance their activities through financial mechanisms to allocate credit and investment.

The Institutional Imperative: The Politics of Equitable Development in Southeast Asia, by former Shorenstein Fellow Erik Kuhonta, argues that the realization of equitable development hinges heavily on strong institutions and on moderate policy and ideology. He does so by exploring how Malaysia and Vietnam have had the requisite institutional capacity and power to advance equitable development, while Thailand and the Philippines, because of weaker institutions, have not achieved the same levels of success.

More detailed descriptions about these insightful volumes, as well as reviews and purchasing information, are available in the publications section of the Shorenstein APARC website.

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State Consent and the Legitimacy of International Institutions

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Thomas Christiano is Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellow at the Princeton University Center for Human Values and professor of philosophy and law at the University of Arizona and co-director of the Rogers Program in Law and Society at the University of Arizona. He is an editor of Politics, Philosophy and Economics, as well as the author of The Constitution of Equality: Democratic Authority and Its Limits (2008) and The Rule of the Many (1996). Christiano has published many papers, mainly in moral and political philosophy, with emphases on democratic theory, distributive justice, and global justice. He is now engaged in projects on the foundations of equality as a principle of distributive justice and on the bases of international justice, the legitimacy of international institutions, and human rights.

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Graham Stuart Lounge

Thomas Christiano Professor of Philosophy and Law Speaker University of Arizona
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On the Demos and its Kin: Nationalisms and Democratic Legitimacy

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Abstract
Both cultural nationalism and democratic theory seek to legitimate political power by rendering it compatible with the freedom of those over whom it is exercised, i.e., by appeal to a notion of collective self-rule. Both doctrines thus advance a self-referential theory of political legitimacy: their principle of legitimation refers right back to the very persons over whom political power is to be exercised. Since self-referential theories base legitimation in a collective self, they must necessarily combine the question of legitimation with the question of boundaries. The problem is that it is impossible to solve both problems together once it is assumed that the collectivity in question is in principle bounded. Cultural nationalism claims that political power is legitimate insofar as it authentically expresses the nation's pre-political culture, but it cannot fix the nation's cultural boundaries pre-politically. Hence the collapse into ethnic nationalism. The democratic theory of bounded popular sovereignty claims that political power is legitimate insofar as it expresses the people's will, but cannot itself legitimate the pre-political boundaries of the people it presupposes. Hence the collapse into cultural nationalism. Only a theory of unbounded popular sovereignty avoids this collapse of demos into nation into ethnos, but such a theory departs radically from traditional theory. It abandons the notion of a pre-politically constituted "will of the people," supports the formation of global democratic forums, and challenges the legitimacy of unilaterally controlled political boundaries.

Arash Abizadeh is associate professor in the Department of Political Science and associate member of the Department of Philosophy, McGill University, and specializes in contemporary political theory and the history of political philosophy. His research focuses on democratic theory and questions of identity, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism; immigration and border control; and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy, particularly Hobbes and Rousseau. He is currently finishing a book titled The Oscillations of Thomas Hobbes: Between Insight and the Will.

Graham Stuart Lounge

Arash Abizadeh Associate Professor, Department of Political Science Speaker McGill University
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E-commerce, online gaming and social networking benefit from internet boom in China: SPRIE visiting scholar details way forward for US internet firms and investors

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Duncan Clark, Visiting Scholar at SPRIE and Chairman/Founder of Beijing-based investment advisory firm BDA China, spoke to a packed room at a seminar titled "Life after Google? The Way Forward for US Internet Firms and Investors in China", hosted by SPRIE, about the appeal and complexities of China's dynamic internet sector. The talk is part of SPRIE's ongoing series of speaker events, seminars and conferences entitled "China 2.0: The Rise of a Digital Superpower".

China's internet population will soon be double that of the US. China is home to a thriving market for social networking, games, e-commerce and other applications. While many individual and institutional investors in Chinese internet firms have profited from this growth, US internet firms themselves have struggled to gain a foothold. In fact a number of the most iconic internet firms in the US - including eBay, Yahoo and Google - have either pulled out of China or significantly scaled back their expectations for the market. Why?
Censorship and government restrictions are often pointed to as the principal cause. Is this justified, or does it sometimes serve as a convenient excuse for other factors such as management missteps?

Certainly Google placed blame squarely with the Chinese government, citing the growing burden of censorship and sophisticated attacks on Gmail as principal motivations for its 2010 decision to scale back its China business. In his 45-minute talk, Clark discussed the implications of Google's move, both for the company (and the benefits to its main competitor Baidu) and for a new wave of US internet companies who are evaluating the market (such as Facebook) or who have recently entered the market (such as Groupon).

Clark explored the psyche driving the Chinese government's approach to internet restrictions and the varying degrees of sensitivity associated with online activities such as social networking, email/IM, games and e-commerce. He also discussed the risks faced by Chinese internet founders/CEOs as they balance the need to serve customers and the stock market with serving the requirements and expectations of the Chinese government and the Communist Party.

The talk reviewed in turn the experience of various US internet companies in China and how elusive the right formula for success can be.

Clark concluded with a discussion of the more positive of US individual and institutional investors. While competitive risks remain substantial, backing Chinese management teams to some extent insulates investors from the vagaries of government regulation. Chinese internet firms such as Baidu, Tencent and Taobao have emerged as some of the world's most highly visited and most valuable sites. Clark explored the questions of how sustainable are their positions in China, and whether these firms can demonstrate an ability to innovate and extend their reach beyond China's shores.

Duncan Clark and Marguerite Gong Hancock, associate director of SPRIE, are continuing their research into these and other topics as part of SPRIE's China 2.0: The Rise of a Digital Superpower project. SPRIE looks forward to the perspectives of upcoming invited speakers as the program keeps apace with the fast growing but unpredictable China internet market.

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Duncan Clark, visiting scholar at SPRIE, gave a talk at Stanford on "Life after Google? The way forward for US internet firms and investors in China" on April 13, 2011.
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