Within one year of the project, pilot households saw a $0.69 per capita daily increase in standard of living. Project households purchased more food across food gropus, particularly in the dry season, and earned an extra $7.50 per week from local market sales.
Michael Blake is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Washington. He holds a joint appointment with the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs. He received his bachelor degree in philosophy and economics from the University of Toronto, and his legal training at Yale Law School. He specializes in social and political philosophy, philosophy of law, and international ethics.
Sponsored by the Program on Global Justice, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Department of Political Science (Stanford Political Theory Workshop).
Encina Ground Floor Conference Room
China is experiencing urbanization at an unprecedented rate over the last two decades. The overall goal of this paper is to understand the extent of and the factors driving urban expansion in China from the late-1980s to 2000. We use a unique three-period panel data set of high-resolution satellite imagery data and socioeconomic data for entire area of coterminous China. Consistent with a number of the key hypotheses generated by the monocentric model, our results demonstrate the powerful role that the growth of income has played in China's urban expansion. In some empirical models, the other key variables in the monocentric model, population, the value of agricultural land and transportation costs, also matter. Adapting the basic empirical model to account for the environment in developing countries, we also find that industrialization and the rise of the service sector appear to have affected the growth of the urban core, but their role was relatively small when compared to the direct effects of economic growth. We also make a methodological contribution, demonstrating the potential importance of accounting for unobserved fixed effects.
This talk will discuss the study of a new factor that makes civil war more likely: the inability of political actors to make credible promises to broad segments of society. Lacking this ability, both elected and unelected governments pursue public policies that leave citizens less well-off and more prone to revolt. At the same time, these actors have a reduced ability to build an anti-insurgency capacity in the first place, since they are less able to prevent anti-insurgents from themselves mounting coups. However, while reducing the risk of conflict overall, increasing credibility can, over some range, worsen the effects of natural resources and ethnic fragmentation on civil war. Empirical tests using various measures of political credibility support these conclusions.
About the speaker:
Philip Keeferis a Lead Research Economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank. Since receiving his PhD in Economics from Washington University at St. Louis in 1991, he has worked continuously on the interaction of institutions, political economy and economic development on issues ranging from the impact of insecure property rights on economic growth to the effect of political credibility on the fiscal and monetary policy choices of governments. His work has appeared in journals ranging from the Quarterly Journal of Economics to the American Review of Political Science.
CISAC Conference Room
On November 13-14, 2006, SPRIE and the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) together with the School of Technology Management, National Tsing Hua University, co-sponsored "High Tech Regions 2.0: Sustainability and Reinvention," a workshop at Stanford University.
Scholars met during the two-day event to present research papers and discuss their work at the nine workshop sessions.
The central topic, explored in extensive discussions, was the sustainability of high tech regions, both here in the United States and around the world. Several sessions were devoted to case studies of regional high tech centers: Silicon Valley, Hsinchu (Taiwan), Daedeok (South Korea) and a number of cities in mainland China.
Other sessions investigated the role of government policy in the creation, survival and evolution of high tech regions, as well as the impact of innovation strategies on regional networks.
Select materials from the workshop will be made public in the future and will be available on the SPRIE web site.
This is a Special Seminar within the CDDRL Taiwan Democracy Program (co-sponsored with Shorenstein APARC).
Richard Bush is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and Director of its Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies. The Center serves as a locus for research, analysis, and debate to enhance policy development on the pressing political, economic, and security issues facing Northeast Asia and U.S. interests in the region.
Bush came to Brookings in July 2002, after serving almost five years as the Chairman and Managing Director of the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT), the mechanism through which the United States Government conducts substantive relations with Taiwan in the absence of diplomatic relations.
Dr. Bush began his professional career in 1977 with the China Council of The Asia Society. In July 1983 he became a staff consultant on the House Foreign Affairs Committee's Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs. In January 1993 he moved up to the full committee, where he worked on Asia issues and served as liaison with Democratic Members. In July 1995, he became National Intelligence Officer for East Asia and a member of the National Intelligence Council (NIC), which coordinates the analytic work of the intelligence committee. He left the NIC in September 1997 to become head of AIT.
Richard Bush received his undergraduate education at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. He did his graduate work in political science at Columbia University, getting an M.A. in 1973 and his Ph.D. in 1978. He is the author of a number of articles on U.S. relations with China and Taiwan, and of At Cross Purposes, a book of essays on the history of America's relations with Taiwan.
Philippines Conference Room
About the Speaker:
Sheri Berman is Associate Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her research interests focus on issues of comparative political development, European politics and history, globalization, social theory, and history of the Left. Some of her recent publications include: "The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Ideological Dynamics of the Twentieth Century" (2006, Cambridge University Press); "Violence, Conflict, and Civil Society," Mittelweg, Spring 2006 (academic paper); "Islamism, Revolution, and Civil Society," Perspectives on Politics, 1, 2, June 2003 (academic paper). Berman received her B.A. (1987) from Yale, and M.A. (1990) and PhD. (1994) from Harvard.
About the Event:
The best way to understand how stable, well-functioning democracies develop is to analyze the political trajectories such countries have actually taken. For the most part, this means looking at Western Europe and North America. When we look carefully at these cases we see that the political backstory of most democracies is one of struggle, conflict and even violence. Problems and even failures did not mean that democracy would be impossible to achieve some day; in fact, they can in retrospect often be seen to be integral parts of the long-term processes through which non-democratic institutions, elites, and cultures were delegitimized and eventually eliminated, and their democratic successors forged. An important reason many do not seem to realize this is because of a lack of historical perspective: contemporary analysts often ignore or misread the often messy and unattractive manner in which the current crop of stable democracies actually developed. Understanding past cases better is thus a crucial step toward putting today's democratization and democracy promotion discussions into proper intellectual and historical context.
CISAC Conference Room
Why are opposition party leaders able to form multiparty coalitions to compete against entrenched incumbents in some African countries, but not in others? Leo Arriola challenges the conventional wisdom by showing that opposition coalitions are formed more frequently than is suggested by the region's relatively high reelection rates. Using data on executive elections held in 33 African countries between 1990 and 2005, he demonstrates that opposition coalitions are more likely to be affected by economic conditions than by ethnic divisions or institutional arrangements.
Leo Arriola is a pre-doctoral fellow at CDDRL. He seeks to understand under what conditions opposition parties in Africa can achieve coordination in running against incumbents. He takes Kenya, Ethiopia, Senegal and Cameroon as his main case studies. Leo is advised by Jim Fearon and David Laitin at Stanford, and has returned from fieldwork in Senegal and Cameroon in the Summer of 2006. He has previously spent time conducting research in Ethiopia and Kenya. He has a BA from Claremont, McKenna, and an MPA in International Relations from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton. When he leaves CDDRL next summer, he will become Assistant Professor of Political Science at Berkeley.
Encina Ground Floor Conference Room
