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.
The state-owned company Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Limited (ONGC) is India's largest company devoted to exploration and production (E&P). This paper attempts to unpack the dynamic of the government-ONGC relationship. Focusing specifically on how government ownership and control has influenced ONGC's performance and strategy, this paper makes four main arguments.
First, ONGC exists, just as with national oil companies in many other countries, because of a legacy of suspicion about outsiders. It performed well when it was tasked with things that were not that difficult and when it had help for the more difficult ventures, such as frontier E&P and development.
Second, ONGC has run into trouble as it matured, and the roots of its troubles are mainly in its interactions with the GoI and secondarily in its management.
Third, a slew of reforms instituted since the mid 1990s have fundamentally changed the landscape of the E&P sector in India and the dynamic of government-ONGC relationship. Targeted at improving corporate governance, enhancing competition in E&P, and eliminating price controls, those reforms have had a mixed impact on ONGC's performance and strategy. They also highlight the difficulties the government has had in encouraging higher efficiencies in ONGC and the oil and gas sector.
Fourth, given the deep interconnects of the oil and gas sector with India's political economy, fixing the oil and gas sector essentially entails fixing the larger political economy within which the sector is embedded.
On Tuesday, September 7, 2010, the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development in collaboration with the Stanford University's Graduate School of Business and Stanford Law School hosted a special conference on Climate Policy Instruments in the Real World.
This conference featured presentations by leading researchers on the political, economic, and regulatory challenges associated with major climate policy instruments. The goal of this conference was to transfer the state-of-the-art in policy-relevant academic research on key aspects of climate policy design and analysis to the business, regulatory and policymaking communities. Each presentation was followed by comments from two discussants that develop the practical implications of the research results presented for decision-makers in industry and government.
Topics our experts explored included: setting a price for carbon, engaging the developing world in climate change mitigation, the role of renewable energy sources in climate change mitigation, mechanisms for reducing greenhouse gases from the transportation sector, managing intermittency in the electricity sector, and mechanisms for adapting to climate change.
We would like to thank everybody for their participation on September 7, 2010.
For more conference information, please visit:
http://www.certain.com/system/profile/web/index.cfm?PKwebID=0x1992925e31&varPage=home
Bechtel Conference Center
Stanford University
Economics Department
579 Jane Stanford Way Stanford, CA 94305-6072
Website: https://fawolak.org/
Frank A. Wolak is a Professor in the Department of Economics at Stanford University. His fields of specialization are Industrial Organization and Econometric Theory. His recent work studies methods for introducing competition into infrastructure industries -- telecommunications, electricity, water delivery and postal delivery services -- and on assessing the impacts of these competition policies on consumer and producer welfare. He is the Chairman of the Market Surveillance Committee of the California Independent System Operator for electricity supply industry in California. He is a visiting scholar at University of California Energy Institute and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).
Professor Wolak received his Ph.D. and M.S. from Harvard University and his B.A. from Rice University.
This annual award, which carries a cash prize of $10,000, honors a journalist not only for a distinguished body of work, but also for the particular way that work has helped American readers to understand the complexities of Asia. It is awarded jointly by the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Center at Stanford University, and the Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University, part of the Kennedy School of Government. Events have been hosted alternately at both centers.
Barbara Crossette serves as United Nations correspondent for The Nation and is a freelance writer on foreign policy and international affairs. Her articles and essays have appeared periodically in World Policy Journal, published at the New School University in New York. "Will John Bolton Ruin the UN?" an article published in Foreign Policy, in the July/August 2006, presaged the campaign that led to the resignation of the ambassador.
Crossette was the New York Times bureau chief at the United Nations from 1994 to 2001. She was earlier a Times chief correspondent in Southeast Asia and South Asia and a diplomatic reporter in Washington. She has also reported from Central America, the Caribbean, and Canada, and been deputy foreign editor and senior editor in charge of the Times' weekend news operations. Before joining newspaper paper in 1973, Crossette worked for The Evening and Sunday Bulletin in Philadelphia and The Birmingham Post in Birmingham, England.
She is the author of several books on Asia, including So Close to Heaven: The Vanishing Buddhist Kingdoms of the Himalayas (1995) and The Great Hill Stations of Asia (1998). The latter was a New York Times notable book of the year in 1998. In 2000, Crossette wrote a survey of India and Indian-American relations, India: Old Civilization in a New World, for the Foreign Policy Association in New York. She is also the author of India Facing the 21st Century (1993). Most recently she was a co-author with George Perkovich of a section on India in the 2009 book Powers and Principles: International Leadership in a Shrinking World.
In 1999, Crossette received the Business Council of the United Nations' Korn Ferry Award for outstanding reporting on the organization, and in 2003 the United Nations Correspondents' Association's lifetime achievement award. In 2008, she was awarded a Fulbright prize for her contributions to international understanding.
Crossette has taught journalism, politics, and international affairs at a broad range of institutions, including the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Punjab University, Princeton University, Bard College, and the Royal University of Phnom Penh. In 2004 and 2005 she also worked with journalists in Brazil as a Knight International Press Fellow.
Born in Philadelphia, Crossette received a BA in history and political science from Muhlenberg College. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Women's Foreign Policy Group.
This lecture will examine the origins of the Cold War in East Asia, how early the Cold War came to Korea, how the Korean War transformed the containment doctrine, how it solidified the continuing divisions in East Asia, and how it transformed defense policy in the United States, leading to a far-flung structure of seemingly permanent military bases in South Korea, Japan, Germany, and many more countries that lasts down to 2010. Professor Cumings will also examine problems of history and memory regarding what most Americans call "the forgotten war."
Bruce Cumings teaches international history, modern Korean history and East Asian political economy at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1987 and where he is the Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor and the chairman of the History Department. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1975. He has taught at Swarthmore College (1975-77), the University of Washington (1977-86), and Northwestern University (1994-97). He is the author of the two-volume study, The Origins of the Korean War (Princeton University Press, 1981, 1990), War and Television (Visal-Routledge, 1992), Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History (W. W. Norton, 1997; updated ed. 2005), Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American—East Asian Relations (Duke University Press, 1999; paperback 2002), North Korea: Another Country (New Press, 2003), co-author of Inventing the Axis of Evil (New Press, 2004), and is the editor of the modern volume of the Cambridge History of Korea (forthcoming). He is a frequent contributor to The London Review of Books, The Nation, Current History, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and Le Monde Diplomatique. The first volume of his Origins won the John King Fairbank book award of the American Historical Association for the best book on East Asia in the previous two years, and the second volume won the Quincy Wright book award of the International Studies Association. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999, and is the recipient of fellowships from the Ford Foundation-funded Foreign Area Fellows program, NEH, the MacArthur Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study at Stanford, and the Abe Fellowship Program of the Social Science Research Council. He was also the principal historical consultant for the Thames Television/PBS 6-hour documentary, Korea: The Unknown War. He recently published Dominion From Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power, which was ranked as one of the top 25 books of 2009 by the Atlantic Monthly. Random House will publish his short book, The Korean War, on the war’s 60th anniversary in 2010. He is also contracted to publish a new, single-volume synoptic edition of The Origins of the Korean War.
Philippines Conference Room
Associate Professor Jae-Seung Lee from Korea University, Division of International Studies will be leading the seminar on energy security and cooperation in Northeast Asia (including East Asia).
Professor Lee holds a B.A. in political science from Seoul National University (1991) and an M.A (1993) and PhD (1998) in political science from Yale University. He also earned a certificate from the Institut D'Etudes Politiques de Paris in France in 1995.
Before joining the faculty of Korea University, he had served as a professor at the Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security (IFANS), the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. As a scholar in international political economy, he authored a number of books and articles on Korea, East Asia, and Europe. His current research includes energy security and energy diplomacy of Korea, among others. Prof. Lee has directed the Korea Energy Forum (KEF), an interdisciplinary energy research initiative, and conducted a number of energy projects with UNESCAP and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. He has taught at Yale University, Seoul National University, and Korea University.
Stanford University
While most Asian economies rode out the recession fairly well, disturbing human development statistics across the region persist. Rapidly increasing wealth is not being shared, and women and minority populations are often the most at risk of falling behind, especially in South Asia.
Barbara Crossette, a former foreign correspondent for The New York Times, is the author of several books on Asia, including So Close to Heaven: The Vanishing Buddhist Kingdoms of the Himalayas, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1995 and in paperback by Random House/
The Shorenstein Journalism Award, which carries a cash prize of $10,000, honors a journalist not only for a distinguished body of work, but also for the particular way that work has helped American readers to understand the complexities of Asia. It is awarded jointly by the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Center in the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University, and the Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. This year’s recipient is Barbara Crossette.
Paul Brest Hall
Building 4, 555 Salvatierra Walk
Stanford, CA 94305
The Liberation Technology Seminar Series will take a break during Spring Quarter 2010 in order to present a class taught by co-sponsors of the program, Joshua Cohen, Professor of Political Science, Philosophy and Law and Terry Winograd, Professor of Computer Science. This class will have small project teams work with computer scientists from the University of Nairobi to design new technologies for promoting development and democracy. Students conduct observations to identify needs, generate concepts, create prototypes, and test their appropriateness. Some projects may continue past the quarter towards full-scale implementation. It will be taught through the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford.
The Liberation Technology Seminar Series will resume in Fall 2010 and hopes to present some of the projects from the class as well as a variety of other speakers on the role of information and communication technology in advancing freedom, human rights, and economic and social development. A conference is also being planned for the early Fall so please keep an eye on our website.
Abstract
Social science interpretations of the meltdown emphasize
system characteristics such as complexity and coupling, and/or culture as in
neo-institutional theories. Examining regulatory changes, regulatory
agents, elected representatives, firms and the many warnings, I argue that the
role of human agents has been greatly neglected. Building on earlier work on
"executive failure" I offer an agentic interpretation that is missing from both
of the social science interpretations. Structure (systems) and culture (neo
institutional theory) are valuable but incomplete.
Charles Perrow is an emeritus professor of sociology at Yale University and a visiting professor at CISAC in the winter and spring terms. Among his award-winning research is Organizing America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of American Capitalism (Princeton, 2002), and Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies (Princeton, 1999). His recent articles include "Modeling Firms in the Global Economy," Theory and Society, 2009, v 38:3, May, 217-243, "Organizations and Global Warming," in Constance Lever-Tracy, ed. Handbook of Society and Climate change (Routledge, forthcoming, 2010), "Complexity, Catastrophe, and Modularity," Sociological Inquiry 78:2, May 2008 162-73; "Conservative Radicalism," Organization 15:2 2008 271-77; "Disasters Evermore? Reducing our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters," Social Research 75:3 Fall, 2008. His recent membership on a National Academy of Science panel on the possibilities of certifying software led to his current work on cyber security. He is also writing on the economic meltdown, but his major interest now is the institutional/organizational aspects of global warming. He received his BA, MA, and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, all in sociology.
Kenneth Arrow is the Joan Kenney Professor of Economics and Professor of Operations Research, emeritus; a CHP/PCOR fellow; and an FSI senior fellow by courtesy. He is a Nobel Prize-winning economist whose work has been primarily in economic theory and operations, focusing on areas including social choice theory, risk bearing, medical economics, general equilibrium analysis, inventory theory, and the economics of information and innovation. He was one of the first economists to note the existence of a learning curve, and he also showed that under certain conditions an economy reaches a general equilibrium. In 1972, together with Sir John Hicks, he won the Nobel Prize in economics, for his pioneering contributions to general equilibrium theory and welfare theory.
Arrow has served on the economics faculties of the University of Chicago, Harvard and Stanford. Prior to that, he served as a weather officer in the U.S. Air Corps (1942-46), and a research associate at the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics (1947-49). In addition to the Nobel Prize, he has received the American Economic Association's John Bates Clark Medal. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine. He received a BS from City College, an MA and PhD from Columbia University, and holds approximately 20 honorary degrees.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room