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.
Virtually all human societies were once organized tribally, yet over time most developed new political institutions which included a central state that could keep the peace and uniform laws that applied to all citizens. Some went on to create governments that were accountable to their citizens. We take these institutions for granted, but they are absent or are unable to perform in many of today's developing countries-with often disastrous consequences for the rest of the world.
In The Origins of Political Order, Francis Fukuyama, author of the bestselling The End of History and the Last Man, provides a sweeping account of how today's basic political institutions developed. The first of a major two-volume work begins with politics among our primate ancestors and follows the story through the emergence of tribal societies, the growth of the first modern state in China, the beginning of a rule of law in India and the Middle East, and the development of political accountability in Europe up until the eve of the French Revolution.
Drawing on a vast body of knowledge-history, evolutionary biology, archaeology, and economics-Fukuyama has produced a brilliant, provocative work that offers fresh insights on the origins of democratic societies and raises essential questions about the nature of politics.
Platts Coal Trader International Vol. 11, Issue 67, Pages 5-6
Australia faces serious
challenges over the next 20 years in maintaining its hard-won place as a
leading coal exporting country and capturing new market share, according to a research
paper published by Stanford University's Program on Energy and Sustainable
Development April 5.
Following earlier papers on
China, Indonesia and South Africa's coal industries, the latest PESD paper,
entitled Australia's Black Coal Industry: Past Achievements and Future Challenges,
has been written by coal industry expert Bart Lucarelli.
The paper sketches the
development of Australia's export coal industry, from its shaky start in the
aftermath of the Second World War amid a glut of cheap oil, to the "phenomenal success
story" of today. The renaissance of
Australia's coal industry was assisted by the discovery of vast deposits of
high-quality coking coal and thermal coal in Queensland's Bowen Basin and the
Hunter Valley of New South Wales
respectively, along with new mining technologies and the economic expansions of
Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, Lucarelli said.
During the Australian coal
industry's competitive phase - 1987 to 2003 - export coal prices were
relatively stable, but the growth rate of Australia's coal industry slowed as Indonesia
became a significant coal exporter. Since
2003, Australia's coal industry has been in a "volatile price phase," as export
coking and thermal coal prices have soared to record highs with the entry of
China and latterly India into the international seaborne market, while weather
events have affected supplies from coal exporting countries.
Looking to the next 20 years,
Lucarelli forecasts serious challenges to the preeminence of Australia's export
coal industry in the shape of infrastructure constraints, regulatory risks and
under-investment in railways and ports by government-owned companies. "The most pressing and immediate technical
challenge to the black coal industry of Australia is the shortage of rail and port infrastructure to
support its further growth," said Lucarelli in the research paper.
‘Chronic infrastructure shortages'
Governments in Queensland and New South Wales have proposed projects for expanding
their rail and port networks to support a significant increase in Australian
coal exports, which are forecast to grow to 540 million mt by 2020 from 240
million mt in 2010. "Part of the reason
that chronic infrastructure shortages are likely to persist has to do with the
type of technology being implemented - large rail and fixed land port systems,"
Lucarelli explained. Large port and rail
projects are required for economies of scale, but involve long lead times, high
upfront costs and complex regulatory clearances.
"A second reason for the chronic
shortage of infrastructure has been the reliance on state-owned entities to
make the necessary investments in the rail and port systems," Lucarelli said. Government-owned
rail and port companies tend to be less nimble and entrepreneurial in their
decision-making than the private sector, though some port and rail companies have
been privatized recently - most notably Queenslandbased rail company QR
National and the port of Brisbane. Regulatory
uncertainty stemming from the Australian government's stop-start policy on
curbing carbon emissions and its proposed Mineral Resource Rent Tax on
coal-mining profits are additional factors clouding the expansion of Australia's
coal industry. "Potential coal mining
projects most at risk due to regulatory uncertainty are the massive new steam
coal projects planned for the Galilee, Gunnedah and Surat basins," Lucarelli
said. Illustrating the potential for
expansion within Australia's coal industry, Lucarelli said that if only two of
the advancedstage projects in the Surat Basin in Queensland started production on
schedule, they could add 110 million mt/year of thermal coal exports by 2015. This is almost as much thermal coal as
Australia exported for the whole of 2008, at 115 million mt.
One of the fastest-growing segments of livestock farming in the United States is aquaculture, according to Rosamond L. Naylor, a Stanford professor of environmental Earth system science and director of Stanford's Program on Food Security and the Environment. And like any other form of livestock, fish generate waste.
But just what happens to the waste produced by coastal aquaculture has largely been a matter of conjecture.
"For many years, people have assumed that because of the ocean's size, because of the energy in its currents, that any substance you introduced into the ocean would quickly be diluted into concentrations that were barely detectable," said Jeffrey R. Koseff, professor of civil and environmental engineering.
Now Koseff and Naylor, together with Oliver Fringer, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, and a team of colleagues, have developed a computational model that allows researchers to predict where the effluent from a coastal fish farm would go. The answer may not always be appealing to down-current swimmers and surfers.
"We discovered that the state of the natural environment around fish pens can dramatically affect how far waste plumes travel from the source," Koseff said. "This suggests that we should not simply assume 'dilution is the solution' for aquaculture pollution."
The simulation incorporates the influence of variables such as tides, currents, the rotation of the Earth and the physical structure of the pens in calculating the dispersal pattern of the waste.
"These plumes actually remain quite coherent at very long distances from the source and could become a major pollution problem in coastal regions," Koseff said.
Naylor and Koseff said the model should prove valuable in selecting appropriate sites for future fish farms. Knowing the amounts of feces and uneaten food that are generated by pens, researchers will be able to predict how that dissolved waste will travel from a particular location, given local conditions.
Fish pens off the coast of Greece. Aquaculture projects such as this are expected to play an increasing role in producing fish for consumption as wild fisheries decline, but dealing with the effluent from fish farms is an increasing concern.
Naylor said the model will likely show that some locations previously thought appropriate for fish farms are actually not suitable, but she doesn't think the aquaculture industry will necessarily see that as a bad thing. Having clearly defined boundaries of where aquaculture is acceptable will help the industry avoid conflict with other users of coastal waters.
"A lot of the industry people that I have talked to are not working against the environment, they are really trying to make aquaculture work, and this would provide a useful tool for them," Naylor said.
Naylor, Koseff and their colleagues will be publishing their findings in an upcoming issue of Environmental Fluid Mechanics. The paper is online now.
Naylor said their findings are quite timely, in light of legislation in the works at both the state and federal levels.
In 2006, California passed the Sustainable Oceans Act, aimed at protecting the biologically rich waters off the coast while also recognizing the importance and economic value of providing fresh seafood.
Naylor said that a draft of the regulations to implement that legislation is currently under review and this new modeling tool should help in setting guidelines for locating and monitoring aquaculture.
At the federal level, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is taking public comments through April 11 on a draft of a national aquaculture policy.
"After the bill is passed, rules and regulations will have to be written around it and what we are providing now is a tool to help with that," she said.
Koseff acknowledged that some people might balk at relying on a computer model to guide regulations.
"We understand and recognize the limitations of the simulations," he said. "But we have confidence that the physics that we are representing in the model are realistic and our results are very representative of what happens in a near-coastal environment."
Naylor said that for an aquaculture operation to be economically feasible, a lot of pens will likely have to be concentrated in one area, making waste a significant concern.
"I also work a lot in terrestrial livestock, and I think the dissolved wastes that come out are one of the worst aspects of intensive animal raising," she said.
"If we are really thinking about getting our animal protein from fish in the future, and it is coming from net pens that are in the ocean, one of the big fears is, are we going to have feedlots of the sea?
"We would really like to completely avoid the problems we have seen in terrestrial livestock. That would be the ultimate goal and this model can help achieve that."
Naylor is the director of Stanford's Program on Food Security and the Environment and a senior fellow at the university's Woods Institute for the Environment. Koseff is co-director of the Woods Institute and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
This paper was prepared for Stanford University’s Global Food Policy and Food Security Symposium Series, hosted by the Center on Food Security and the Environment, and supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The talk was delivered April 7, 2011.
Structural change during most of the first 5 decades of post-independence Africa has been productivity-reducing. It has been driven by negative diversification reflected in labor migrating from the underperforming, yet higher-productivity agricultural sector into an oversized, lower-productivity service sector. In the aftermath of the failure of the first generation of import-substituting, inward-oriented industrialization efforts of the 1960s, African governments had all but given up on the search for practical industrial policies. Meanwhile, agriculture continued to be confronted with significant policy and institutional challenges, moving from an environment marked with heavy direct and implicit taxation into an era of the controversial structural adjustment policies that significantly curtailed services support to the sector. The combined effect resulted in stagnation in the manufacturing sector and forced specialization in the primary sector. The latter continued to be dominated by a struggling agricultural sector, which could not create enough employment to absorb an increasing labor force from a rapidly growing population. In addition, people started to migrate from villages to rural towns and urban centers and in the process swelled up the ranks of the under-employed in a fast-growing informal sector.
The economic recovery of the last 15 years provides strong hope that African countries are starting to turn the page. The focus now should be on sustaining and accelerating the recovery process, enacting policies to raise productivity in the agricultural and service sectors, and revitalize the modern industrial sector. A good start is the continent-wide effort under the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) to encourage evidence-based policy planning and implementation and to increase investment in agriculture. However, it needs to be complemented with innovative industrialization policies to develop comparative advantage in higher-valued manufacturing goods. Future development strategies should seek to raise productivity in the service sector, which now has a large and growing share of low-productivity labor. The objective of these strategies should be to modernize production processes and to promote innovation in the production of domestic and household goods ranging from metalwork to wood and leather processing to a host of handicraft products.
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.
