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.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Over five years since 9/11, the United States is still struggling to define the nature of the terrorist challenge it faces let alone fully comprehend it. As a consequence, the United States and its partners in the "global war on terror" still lack a comprehensive strategy for responding to the challenge. Drawing on a growing area of social science research relating to "social contagion" phenomena, the challenge posed by "Islamist militancy" will be assessed using the principles and practices of epidemiology. A new more promising strategy emerges as a consequence.
Paul B. Stares is vice president of the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) and director of its Center for Conflict Analysis and Prevention. He currently focuses on northeast Asian security issues, U.S. post-conflict stability operations, and counterterrorism policy. He has authored or edited nine books in addition to numerous book chapters, articles, and op-eds in leading U.S. and European newspapers. In 2006, Stares led the Iraq Study Groups Strategic Environment Expert Working Group.
Prior to joining USIP in 2002, Stares was associate director and senior research scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. From 1996 to 2000 he worked in Japan, first as a senior research fellow at the Japan Institute of International Affairs and then as director of studies at the Japan Center for International Exchange. At various times, Stares has been a senior fellow and research associate in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution as well as a NATO fellow, a scholar-in-residence at the MacArthur Foundation Moscow Office, a Rockefeller International Relations Fellow, and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University.
He has also held academic posts at the University of Sussex and the University of Lancaster in Great Britain, where he received his PhD.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Biological forensics has made considerable strides in the past decade, in part, due to advances in DNA analysis and, in part, due to advances other microscopic diagnostic techniques such as atomic force microscopy to analyze structural properties of microorganisms and secondary-ion mass spectrometry to analyze the chemical constituents of microorganisms. This talk will cover recent advances in the field of microbial forensics with application to potential bioterror attacks, excluding investigations that currently are ongoing.
Paul Jackson is the forensics group leader within the Biosciences Directorate at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and, prior to that, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Jackson is currently a member of the FBI Working Group for Forensic Analysis of Microbial Evidence. His past research has involved analyses of anthrax samples from the 1979 anthrax outbreak in Sverdlovsk, Russia, and the 2001 anthrax letter attacks in the United States. His current research focuses on genetic typing methods applied to biological toxins such as Ricin. He received his BS from the University of Washington and his PhD from the University of Utah.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
The speaker will describe his experiences over ten years of developing a comprehensive program to engage the formerly top secret Soviet biological weapons complex through joint scientific research and disease surveillance. He will also discuss how lessons learned can be applied to potential new efforts to reduce global threats of bioterrorism and potential pandemics.
Andrew Weber is the adviser for cooperative threat reduction policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. His responsibilities include developing and overseeing CTR biological threat reduction programs in the former Soviet Union, and nuclear and chemical weapons threat reduction projects in Central Asia. Before coming to the Office of the Secretary of Defense in 1996, Weber served as a U.S. Foreign Service officer in Saudi Arabia, Germany, Kazakhstan, and Hong Kong. Weber holds an MSFS degree from Georgetown University and a BA from Cornell University. He speaks Russian. Weber is an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Graduate School of Foreign Service.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Santiago Levy is a Mexican economist and former General Director of the Mexican Social Security Institute. As director of the Institute, he championed pension reform and extended social security coverage to rural workers. Prior to that, Levy was Chief economist and head of the Research Department of the Inter-American Development Bank (2001 - 2002). From 1994 to 2000, he was Deputy Minister at the Ministry of Finance in Mexico, where he was the force behind Progresa-Oportunidades, Mexico's widely acclaimed incentive-based health, nutrition and education program for the poor.
Levy has taught at Boston University, where he was the Chair of the Economics Department. He has published a number of books and numerous academic and newspaper articles on economic development, budgetary and tax policy, trade policy reform, social policy, rural and regional development.
Santiago Levy obtained his, B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Boston University.
CISAC Conference Room
This paper evaluates the role of self-employment in China's rural economy, while paying attention to whether the rise of self-employment promotes entrepreneurship and is a sign of development, or whether it is a stopover for disadvantaged workers and a sign of distress. Using data on 20-year labor market histories of a nationally representative sample of individuals, we provide descriptive evidence that self-employment in rural China, unlike in some other places, is a sign of development. Econometric evidence from a random-effects probit model and a continuous-time Markov model shows also that self-employment in rural China shares many features of a productive small-business sector.
Water scarcity is one of the key problems that affect northern China, an area that covers 40 percent of the nation's cultivated area and houses almost half of the population. The water availability per capita in North China is only around 300 m3 per capita, which is less than one seventh of the national average. At the same time, expanding irrigated cultivated area, the rapidly growing industrial sector and an increasingly wealthy urban population demand rising volumes of water. As a result, groundwater resources are diminishing in large areas of northern China. For example, between 1958 and 1998, groundwater levels in the Hai River Basin fell by up to 50 meters in some shallow aquifers and by more than 95 meters in some deep aquifers.
Past water policies have not been effective in solving water scarcity problems. China's leaders have put priorities on increasing water supply through developing more canal networks or building more reservoirs. In 2001, the State Council started the South-to-North Water Transfer Project. However, these supply-side approaches cannot meet the increasing demand for water from all of the different sectors and cannot solve water scarcity problems in the long run.
In a book assessing the development of China during the People's Republic era, it is of interest to know how well agriculture has performed and the role that it has played in the development process. Has China produced food and other commodities that have contributed to China's growth? Has it been successful supplying labor to the off farm sector? How has agriculture contributed to the rise in rural incomes and growth, in general? In short, one of the overall goals of this chapter is to document the performance of the agricultural sector and use the criteria of Johnston and Mellor to assess how well the agricultural sector has done.
This chapter, however, seeks to go further than describing the achievements and shortfalls of China's agricultural economy; we also aim to identify the factors, both domestic policies and economic events as well as foreign initiatives, that have induced the performance that we observe. To create an agricultural economy that can feed the population, supply industry with labor and raw materials, earn foreign exchange and produce income for those the live and work in the sector and allow them to be a part of the nation's structural transformation requires a combination of massive investments and well-managed policy effort. The process can only proceed smoothly if an environment is created within which producers can generate output efficiently and earn a profit that can contribute to household income. Policies are required to facilitate the development of markets or other effective institutions of exchange. Although the sector is expected to contribute to the nation's development and allow for substantial extractions of labor and other resources, large volumes of investment also are needed. Investment in education, training, health and social services are needed to increase the productivity of the labor force when they arrive in the factories. Investment is needed in agriculture to improve productivity to keep food prices low, allow farmers to adopt new technologies and farming practice as markets change, and to raise incomes of those that are still in farming. Investment is needed in technology, land, water and other key inputs that are in short supply. In this chapter we seek to point out both policies that have facilitated the performance of the agricultural sector and those that have constrained it.
A key issue in political economy concerns the accountability that governance structures impose on public officials and how elections and representative democracy influences the allocation of public resources. In this paper we exploit a unique survey data set from nearly 2450 randomly selected villages describing China's recent progress in village governance reforms and its relationship to the provision of public goods in rural China between 1998 and 2004. Two sets of questions are investigated using an empirical framework based on a theoretical model in which local governments must decide to allocate fiscal resources between public goods investments and other expenditures. First, we find evidence, both in descriptive and econometric analyses, that when the village leader is elected, ceteris paribus, the provision of public goods rises (compared to the case when the leader is appointed by upper level officials). Thus, in this way it is possible to conclude that democratization, at least at the village level in rural China, appears to increase the quantity of public goods investment. Second, we seek to understand the mechanism that is driving the results. Also based on survey data, we find that when village leaders (who had been elected) are able to implement more public projects during their terms of office, they, as the incumbent, are more likely to be reelected. In this way, we argue that the link between elections and investment may be a rural China version of pork barrel politics.