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.
REAP Director Scott Rozelle gave a talk to investment group Dodge and Cox Investments entitled "China’s Shifting Economy, the Plight of Migrant Workers and Shaping the Hope for China’s Recovery/Future Development: China’s Education Challenge."
Wan Gang, China's Minister of Science and Technology, and Bai Chunli, Vice-President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, presented REAP Director Scott Rozelle with the 2009 Award for Collaboration in Science and Technology in Beijing, China.
This 2009-10 interdisciplinary research workshop examines the
trajectory of human rights discourse and institutions in Africa by
means of regional and international comparisons. Africa is the third,
and most recent, region to establish a regional human rights court, the
African Court of Human and Peoples' Rights (ACPHR). At this critical
juncture in African human rights, there is an urgent need for deeper
understandings and applications of the law of human rights.
This workshop will be of interest and benefit to faculty and
graduate students conducting research in the following areas: African
studies; human rights; law; anthropology; cultural studies; history;
political science and international relations; philosophy; and
sociology.
The workshop, coordinated by Helen Stacy (Law School, FSI), will
meet once this quarter and between three and four times during the
Winter and Spring quarters of the 2009-2010 academic year.
A REAP-sponsored workshop lead by REAP affiliate Paul Gewwe (University of Minnesota) designed to target foundation and non-profit managers and executives, researchers and government officials.
Introduction and objectives
Numerous programs are implemented by governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which are intended to change individuals’ economic or social outcomes. Common examples of this include agricultural extension services, public health programs and education programs. An important (and admittedly difficult to answer) question is: How effective are these programs in changing economic or social outcomes? Comparing the relative effectiveness of different programs, as well as comparing these programs’ benefits to their costs is crucial for governments to understand.
Objectives
To obtain a better understanding of how to objectively assess the impacts of programs through program design and data analysis
To specifically discuss possible scenarios based on how intervention status is decided, and methods for analyzing data for each scenario
This paper
presents data from six of the first countries incorporated into the
Agricultural Lives of the Poor project: Ghana, Guatemala, India, Malawi, Uganda,
and Vietnam. Datasets were selected
based on availability and depth of detail on consumption expenditures, sources
of income, and agricultural practices. Each of these survey components is necessary in order for ALP
to focus on net consumption/production at the household level, and to
understand expenditure and consumption behavior. Net consumption and production data of individual crops and
food groups is further disaggregated by subgroups formed on characteristics
that include economic status, household attributes, livelihood strategies,
calories available, landholding, tenure types, and agricultural input use.
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Program on Food Security and the Environment, Stanford University
The health sector's successes in Vietnam have been described as "legendary" by international donors, but there is always the other side of the story. One can question the objectivity of reports from the government of Vietnam, the World Bank, and the World Health Organization. One can wonder in what areas the health sector has failed, who has paid for a "success story" and at what cost, and how much information is well documented and has been made public. Are there "stylized facts" regarding those aspects of health that have been successfully reformed compared with those where reform has lagged? Given these concerns, how can the research community contribute to improving health policy in Vietnam?
Dr. Truong will share his thought on recent socioeconomic development in Vietnam, discuss key health policy issues, and reflect upon his experiences including a research project in which the University of Queensland collaborated with Ministry of Health of Vietnam. Additional evidence will be drawn from a study of the cost-effectiveness of interventions to reduce tobacco use in Vietnam.
Khoa Truong was a visiting faculty member at the Hanoi School of Public Health and a research fellow at the Health Strategy and Policy Institute in 2008-2009. Prior to that he spent six years as a doctoral fellow at the RAND Corporation. His research interests include tobacco, alcohol, and illicit drug control policies; the impacts of built environments on health; international health issues; and economic development.
He received his doctorate and master of philosophy in policy analysis from the Pardee RAND Graduate School and earned a master's degree in development economics from Williams College. A native of Vietnam, he began his career working with NGOs in bilateral and multilateral development projects in Southeast Asia. He was awarded a Fulbright scholarship and wrote “most outstanding paper” submitted at an AcademyHealth's Annual Research Meeting (acknowledged as the premier forum for sharing the results of scholarship on health services).
Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room
Dr. Khoa Truong
Assistant Professor of Department of Public Health Sciences
Speaker
Clemson University
Martha Crenshaw, a senior fellow at FSI's Center for International Security and
Cooperation, testified Thursday, November 19, before the House
Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing and Terrorism Risk
Assessment on the subject of "Reassessing the Evolving al-Qa'ida Threat
to the Homeland." Crenshaw, who recently launched a three-year effort
to build a global database of terrorist 'family trees,' was joined by
three terrorism experts at the hearing in Washington, D.C.
CDDRL faculty members Francisco Ramirez, John Meyer, and Christine Min Wotipka have been awarded a major grant from the Spencer Foundation for their research on "Globalization, Citizenship, and Education: A Cross-National Study of Curricula, 1995-2005."
Since World War II, cultural, political, and economic globalization have undercut an earlier educational model that only emphasizes the nation state and national citizenship. Increasingly, the student is to be prepared to function as a responsible rights-bearing human person in a global society, relating to people regardless of national citizenship status. Increasingly, this global society is seen as legitimately very diverse and multicultural in character. Diversity within national society is also recognized as legitimate and central. At the individual level students are to learn to express and to respect all sorts of unique values and cultural materials.
This project raises questions surrounding two relevant core changes:
the degree to which national curricula in the social sciences move in the broad direction of globalization and multiculturalism, as opposed to retaining their more nationally oriented postures and
the ways in which national curricula resolve the tensions between building the nation and its citizenry and preparing students as individual human participants in a diverse national and global society.
The study proposes to code and analyze social science textbooks from about seventy countries around the world through the last half-century. These studies will trace worldwide, regional, and national trends in textbook emphases. These studies will examine national and transnational factors that influence the likelihood of the rise and spread of cosmopolitan, multicultural, and individual empowerment frames. These studies will also examine ways in which social studies curricula seek to resolve tensions between national unity and both supra-national and sub-national legitimated diversity.
Berkeley and Stanford - Climate change could increase the likelihood of civil war in sub-Saharan Africa by over 50 percent within the next two decades, according to a new study led by a team of researchers at University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, New York University and Harvard University, and published in today's (Monday, Nov. 23) online issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
The study provides the first quantitative evidence linking climate change and the risk of civil conflict. It concludes by urging accelerated support by African governments and foreign aid donors for new and/or expanded policies to assist with African adaptation to climate change.
"Despite recent high-level statements suggesting that climate change could worsen the risk of civil conflict, until now we had little quantitative evidence linking the two," said Marshall Burke, the study's lead author, a graduate student at UC Berkeley's Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, and research associate at the Program on Food Security and the Environment. "Unfortunately, our study finds that climate change could increase the risk of African civil war by over 50 percent in 2030 relative to 1990, with huge potential costs to human livelihoods."
"We were definitely surprised that the linkages between temperature and recent conflict were so strong," said Edward Miguel, professor of economics at UC Berkeley and faculty director of UC Berkeley's Center for Evaluation for Global Action. "But the result makes sense. The large majority of the poor in most African countries depend on agriculture for their livelihoods, and their crops are quite sensitive to small changes in temperature. So when temperatures rise, the livelihoods of many in Africa suffer greatly, and the disadvantaged become more likely to take up arms."
Understanding the causes and consequences of civil strife in much of the African continent has been a major focus of the social sciences for decades, said Miguel, given the monumental suffering has resulted from it.
In the study, the researchers first combined historical data on civil wars in sub-Saharan Africa with rainfall and temperature records across the continent. They found that between 1980 and 2002, civil wars were significantly more likely in warmer-than-average years, with a 1 degree Celsius increase in temperature in a given year raising the incidence of conflict across the continent by nearly 50 percent.
Building on this historical relationship between temperature and conflict, the researchers then used projections of future temperature and precipitation change to quantify future changes in the likelihood of African civil war. Based on climate projections from 20 global climate models, the researchers found that the incidence of African civil war could increase 55 percent by 2030, resulting in an additional 390,000 battle deaths if future wars are as deadly as recent wars.
All climate models project rising temperatures in coming decades, said David Lobell, study co-author and an assistant professor of environmental earth system science at Stanford and center fellow at Stanford's Program on Food Security and the Environment, a joint program of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Woods Institute for the Environment.
"On average, the models suggest that temperatures over the African continent will increase by a little over 1 degree Celsius by 2030," he added. "Given the strong historical relationship between temperature rise and conflict, this expected future rise in temperature is enough to cause big increases in the likelihood of conflict."
To confirm that this projection was not the result of large effects in just a few countries or due to overreliance on a particular climate model, the researchers recalculated future conflict projections using alternate data. "No matter what we tried - different historical climate data, different climate model projections, different subsets of the conflict data - we still found the same basic result," said Lobell.
It's easy to think of climate change as a long way off, said the researchers, but their study shows how sensitive many human systems are to small increases in temperature, and how fast the negative impacts of climate change could be felt.
"Our findings provide strong impetus to ramp up investments in African adaptation to climate change, for instance by developing crop varieties less sensitive to extreme heat and promoting insurance plans to help protect farmers from adverse effects of the hotter climate," said Burke.
Applying findings from this study could prove useful to policy makers at the upcoming Copenhagen negotiations in December in determining both the speed and magnitude of response to climate change, the authors said.
"If the sub-Saharan climate continues to warm and little is done to help its countries better adapt to high temperatures, the human costs are likely to be staggering," said Burke.
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.
"We were definitely surprised that the linkages between temperature and recent conflict were so strong," said Edward Miguel, professor of economics at UC Berkeley and faculty director of UC Berkeley's Center for Evaluation for Global Action. "But the result makes sense. The large majority of the poor in most African countries depend on agriculture for their livelihoods, and their crops are quite sensitive to small changes in temperature. So when temperatures rise, the livelihoods of many in Africa suffer greatly, and the disadvantaged become more likely to take up arms."