Stanford University

Business

Is Asia Still Rising? Repercussions Of Recession

-

Asia’s economies have been hard hit by the current global financial crisis, despite in most cases enjoying strong macroeconomic fundamentals and stable financial systems.  Early hopes were that the region might be “decoupled” from the Western world’s financial woes and even able to lend the West a hand through high growth and the investment of large foreign exchange reserves.  But that optimism has been dashed by slumping exports, plunging commodity prices, and capital outflows.  The region’s most open, advanced and globally-integrated economies—Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan—are already in severe recession, with Japan, Korea and Malaysia not far behind, and dramatic slowdowns are underway in China, India, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam.  What role did Asian countries play in the genesis of the global crisis, and why have they been so severely impacted?  How is their recovery likely to be shaped by market developments and institutional changes in the West, and in Asia itself in response to the crisis?  Will the region’s embrace of accelerated globalization and marketization following the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis now be retarded or reversed?

Linda Lim is a leading authority on Asian economies, Asian business, and the impacts of the current global financial crisis on Asia, and she has published widely on these topics. Her current research is on the ASEAN countries’ growing economic linkages with China.

Forthcoming in 2009 are Globalizing State, Disappearing Nation: The Impact of Foreign Participation in the Singapore Economy (with Lee Soo Ann) and Rethinking Singapore’s Economic Growth Model. She serves on the executive committees of the Center for Chinese Studies and the Center for International Business Education at the University of Michigan, where formerly she headed the Center for Southeast Asian Studies. Before coming to Michigan, she taught economic development and political economy at Swarthmore. A native of Singapore, she obtained her degrees in economics from Cambridge (BA), Yale (MA), and Michigan (PhD).

Philippines Conference Room

Linda Yuen-Ching Lim Professor of Strategy, Stephen M. Ross School of Business Speaker University of Michigan
Lectures

Network Analysis for International Relations

-

Alexander Montgomery, a visiting assistant professor in 2008-09, was a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC in 2005-2006 and is an assistant professor of political science at Reed College. He has published articles on dismantling proliferation networks and on the effects of social networks of international organizations on interstate conflict. His research interests include political organizations, social networks, weapons of mass disruption and destruction, social studies of technology, and interstate social relations. His current book project is on post-Cold War U.S. counterproliferation policy, evaluating the efficacy of policies towards North Korea, Iran, and proliferation networks.

He has been a joint International Security Program/Managing the Atom Project Research Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He has also worked as a research associate in high energy physics on the BaBar experiment at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and as a graduate research assistant at the Center for International Security Affairs at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He has a BA in physics from the University of Chicago, an MA in energy and resources from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MA in sociology and a PhD in political science from Stanford University.

Emilie Hafner-Burton is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Politics at Princeton University and an affiliate at CISAC, as well as a visiting fellow at Stanford Law School. Formerly she was a predoctoral fellow at CISAC and an associated fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. She was at Oxford University as a Postdoctoral Research Prize Fellow, Nuffield College, and Senior Associate, Global Economic Governance Programme. She writes and teaches on international organization, international political economy, the global governance of gender, social network analysis, design and selection of international regimes, international human rights law and policy, war and economic sanctions, non-proliferation policy, and quantitative and qualitative research design. Her dissertation, Globalizing Human Rights? How Preferential Trade Agreements Shape Government Repression, 1972-2000, won the American Political Science Association Helen Dwight Reid Award for Best Dissertation in International Relations, Law and Politics for 2004-2005, as well as the Best Dissertation in Human Rights Prize for 2003-2004. Her articles are published or forthcoming in International Organization, American Journal of Sociology, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Feminist Legal Studies, European Journal of International Relations, Journal of European Public Policy, and Journal of Peace Research. PhD. Wisconsin.

Walter W. Powell is Professor of Education and (by courtesy) Sociology, Organizational Behavior, Management Science and Engineering, and Communication at Stanford University. He is also an external faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute. He is co-director of the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. He joined the Stanford faculty in July 1999, after previously teaching at the University of Arizona, MIT, and Yale. He has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences three times, and a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna twice. Powell has received honorary degrees from Uppsala University, the Helsinki School of Economics, and Copenhagen Business School, and is a foreign member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences. He is a U.S. editor for Research Policy, and has been a member of the board of directors of the Social Science Research Council since 2000.

Download pdf

Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Emilie Hafner-Burton Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Politics at Princeton University; CISAC Affiliate; Visiting Fellow, Stanford Law School Speaker
Alexander Montgomery Visiting Assistant Professor, CISAC; Assistant Professor of Political Science, Reed College Speaker
Walter W. Powell Professor of Education and (by courtesy) Professor of Sociology, Organizational Behavior, Management Science, and Communication, Stanford University Commentator
Seminars

South Asian security after Mumbai

Authors
News Type
Commentary
Date
Paragraphs

As evidence emerges that the gunmen who caused the carnage in Mumbai were operatives of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba, one question reverberates: Was the Pakistani government responsible for the Mumbai terror attacks?

This is the wrong question to ask. During the late 1980s and the 1990s, the Pakistani government created terror organizations such as Lashkar-e-Taiba as tools of asymmetric warfare against Indian rule in Jammu and Kashmir. In recent years, however, the jihadis, like the magic brooms in Goethe's tale, "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," have taken on a life of their own; along with the government, the army and the intelligence services, such groups now comprise one of the main centers of gravity within Pakistan.

Several factors have enabled them to reach this point. The jihadis have been armed and trained by elements of the Pakistani military and security services, and are funded by a sophisticated international financial network. In addition, they enjoy street popularity, and remain a useful means of combatting India's presence in Kashmir. Consequently, the Pakistani government has balked at opportunities to shut them down.

As a result, the militants are now in a position to conduct their own policy. Like the Goethe's magic brooms, they often act against the interests of their creators, attacking security personnel, assassinating government officials and seizing territory within Pakistan, as well as launching attacks on India that could trigger a regional war. The question, then, is not whether the Pakistani government was responsible for the Mumbai attacks, but who will now play the role of sorcerer and rein in the jihadis.

In theory, either the Pakistani or the Indian government could do so. But Mumbai has shown that neither side is up to the task. The Pakistani government cannot prevent militants from using its soil to strike India. The Indians are completely unable to anticipate or repel such attacks. In addition, they lack the military capabilities needed to clear militant strongholds within Pakistani territory.

The situation requires a radical re-thinking of South Asia's security. Both sides must adopt policies that transcend their traditional comfort zones. The Pakistani government must forswear militancy, end support for the jihadis and accept international military and financial assistance in crushing them. The Pakistani government needs to recognize that the costs of supporting militancy outweigh its benefits, and that Mumbai may be the last chance to get control of the situation. If the government does not act against the militants now, then it may lose control of the state, or find itself drawn into a catastrophic conflict with India in the wake of another terrorist attack.

The Indians, for their part, must start to take their own security more seriously. In 1991, after suffering a major financial crisis, the Indian government came to terms with the failures of its socialist development model and adopted a free-market approach to economic growth. Similarly, India must use this crisis to wholly revamp its security infrastructure. If it fails to do so, the country's impressive economic expansion of recent years will be for naught. Simply put, international corporations will view the country as being too dangerous and refuse to do business there.

The road to real improvement in India will be long and complex, but the Indians can start by properly training and equipping their police and domestic security personnel, who were outgunned and outwitted for nearly three days in Mumbai by just a handful of terrorists. Simultaneously, New Delhi must address the legitimate concerns of its own Muslim community, including the long-aggrieved Kashmiri population, so that overseas terrorists do not find willing collaborators within India.

Finally, there is another player in this subcontinental drama: the United States. The United States, which has forged a strategic partnership with India, can quietly and privately nudge New Delhi to address the internal tensions in Kashmir. More important, however, the United States must use its leverage as Pakistan's largest source of bilateral assistance to press the Pakistanis to end their support for the jihadis. It cannot continue to provide Islamabad with billions of dollars to fight the war on terror while Pakistan-based militant groups conduct operations like the Mumbai attacks. If Pakistan is to continue to benefit from American largesse, it must demonstrate a tangible commitment to ending support for such organizations.

None of these steps will provide an overnight solution to the problems laid bare by the Mumbai attacks. But, in time, they can help South Asia to create its own modern-day sorcerer, and deal with the militant forces that Pakistan has unleashed over decades. If the region fails to do so, its story, unlike Goethe's, will not have a happy ending.

Sumit Ganguly is the director of research of the Center on American and Global Security at Indiana University, Bloomington, and an adjunct senior fellow of the Pacific Council on International Policy. S. Paul Kapur is associate professor at U.S. Naval Postgraduate School; the views he expresses in this article do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. government.

All News button
1

Foreign Investors in the World's Workshop: Legislative Battles and Factory Struggles in China

-

This talk is an overview of the changing role of foreign investment in Chinese workplaces. Foreign investment inflows helped transform the Chinese industrial landscape in the 1990s. As ownership has become blurred and increasingly mixed between domestic-foreign and public-private in China, preferential policies and laws for foreign-invested firms have diminished. A more level playing field has raised the stakes for foreign business and led to their increased participation in national debates on labor legislation and legal protections for workers. This talk will focus on this new role for foreign investors and how it is changing Chinese laws and the Chinese workplace.

Professor Gallagher studies Chinese politics, law and society, and comparative politics. She is currently working on two projects. The first, funded by a Fulbright Research Award and the National Science Foundation, examines the development of rule of law in China by examining the dynamics of legal mobilization of Chinese workers. "The Rule of Law in China: If They Build It, Who Will Come?" focuses on the demand-side of rule of law through an exploration of legal aid plaintiffs in Shanghai, a four-city household survey on legal knowledge, attitude, and practice, and in-depth case analysis of labor disputes. The second project examines labor standards and practices in four Chinese regions. One goal is to find if there are diffusion effects in legislation, court behavior, and labor practices across different regions. Another goal is to look for evidence of a "race to the bottom" in labor standards and social welfare not between China and other competing economies, but within China's own domestic economy.

This talk is part of the Stanford China Program Winter 2009 China Seminar Series titled "30 Years of Reform and Opening in China: How Far from the Cage?"

Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room

Mary E. Gallagher Associate Professor of Political Science Speaker University of Michigan
Seminars

Institutions vs. Policies: A Tale of Two Islands

-

Peter Henry's research on emerging markets provides fundamental insights about the impact of economic reform on the lives of people in developing countries. It uses theory and data to grapple objectively with some of the most important and contentious economic questions of our time: Does debt relief help or hurt poor countries? Should emerging nations permit capital to flow freely in and out of their economies? Is it possible to reduce inflation without undermining economic growth? Peter's answers to these questions appear in the leading academic journals and have led him to testify before the U.S. Congress and various United Nations Ambassadors.

Peter is Konosuke Matsushita Professor of International Economics, the John and Cynthia Fry Gunn Faculty Scholar, and Associate Director of the Center for Global Business and the Economy at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Nonresident Senior Fellow of the Brookings Institution, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. From 2000-2001 he was a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution. The National Science Foundation's Early CAREER Development Program supported his research and teaching from 2001-2006. In 2004 Peter participated in the Copenhagen Consensus, an international conference on how to make the most efficient use of the world's scarcest resources. The Economist magazine named the published proceedings of the conference one of the best business books of 2004.

Peter received his PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1997. While in graduate school, he served as a consultant to the Governors of the Bank of Jamaica and the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank (ECCB). His research at the ECCB contributed to the intellectual foundation for establishing the first stock market in the Eastern Caribbean Currency Area.

Prior to attending MIT, Peter was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University where he received a BA in mathematics and a Full Blue in basketball. He also holds a BA in economics from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he was a Morehead Scholar, a National Merit Scholar, a member of Phi Beta Kappa, a Marshall Scholar-Elect, a reserve wide receiver on the varsity football team, and a finalist in the 1991 campus-wide slam-dunk competition.

Born in Jamaica, Peter became a U.S. citizen in 1986. His wife of 12 years, Lisa J. Nelson, received her BA and MD from Yale University. She is a child psychiatrist and was a Glaxo Welcome Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association from 1995 to 1997. They have four sons: Christian Blair, Langston Alexander, Hayden Montgomery, and Harrison Elbert.

Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Peter Blair Henry

Encina Hall
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

0
peter_blair_henry_-_peter_henry.jpg

Peter Blair Henry is the Class of 1984 Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and Dean Emeritus of New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business. The youngest person ever named to the Stern Deanship, Peter served as Dean from January 2010 through December 2017 and doubled the school’s average annual fundraising. Formerly the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of International Economics at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, from 2001–2006 Peter’s research was funded by an NSF CAREER Award, and he has authored numerous peer-reviewed articles in the flagship journals of economics and finance, as well as a book on global economic policy, Turnaround: Third World Lessons for First World Growth (Basic Books).

A Vice Chair of the Boards of the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Economic Club of New York, Peter also serves on the Boards of Citigroup and Nike. In 2015, he received the Foreign Policy Association Medal, the highest honor bestowed by the organization, and in 2016 he was honored as one of the Carnegie Foundation’s Great Immigrants.

With financial support from the Hoover Institution and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Peter leads the PhD Excellence Initiative, a predoctoral fellowship program in economics that identifies high-achieving students with the deepest commitment to economic research and prepares them for the rigors of pursuing a PhD in the field. For his leadership of the PhD Excellence Initiative, Peter received the 2022 Impactful Mentoring Award from the American Economic Association. Peter received his PhD in economics from MIT and Bachelor’s degrees from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a Morehead-Cain Scholar, a member of Phi Beta Kappa, a reserve wide receiver on the football team, and a finalist in the 1991 campus-wide slam dunk competition.

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1969, Peter became a U.S. citizen in 1986. He lives in Stanford and Düsseldorf with his wife and four sons.

Class of 1984 Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution
Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Dean Emeritus, New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business
Hide publication sections
Off
Date Label
Peter B. Henry Konosuke Matsushita Professor of International Economics, Gunn Faculty Scholar Speaker Stanford Graduate School of Business and CDDRL Faculty Member
Seminars

Stanford students learn about health and healthcare in East Asia

Authors
Karen Eggleston
News Type
News
Date
Paragraphs

Demographic change and long-term care in Japan, chronic non-communicable disease in China, national health insurance in South Korea, TB control in North Korea, pharmaceutical policy in the region and global safety in drug supply chains -- these are some of the topics explored in a new Stanford course: East Asian Studies 117 and 217,  "%course1%." Taught in fall 2008 by Karen Eggleston, Director of the Asia Health Policy Program, the course has enrolled students not only of East Asian studies but also other undergraduate majors as well as graduate students from the School of Education, School of Medicine, and Graduate School of Business.

 

The course discusses population health and healthcare systems in contemporary China, Japan, and Korea (north and south). Using primarily the lens of social science, especially health economics, participants analyze recent developments in East Asian health policy. In addition to seminar discussions, students engage in active exploration of selected topics outside the classroom, culminating in individual research papers and group projects that present findings in creative ways. For example, several students prepared an overview of health and healthcare in North Korea; three MBA students prepared a proposal for a healthcare venture in China (+PPT+ 1.2MB); and others attended related colloquia, interviewed researchers, and prepared summaries for public posting, such as the article on gender imbalance in China.

All News button
1

Capitalizing On Innovation: The Case of Japan

-

Japan's industrial landscape is characterized by hierarchical forms of industry organization that are increasingly inadequate in modern sectors, where innovation relies on platforms and horizontal ecosystems of firms producing complementary products. Using three case studies--software, animation and mobile telephony--two key sources of inefficiencies that this mismatch can create will be illustrated.

First, hierarchical industry organizations can "lock out" certain types of innovation indefinitely by perpetuating established business practices. Second, even when the vertical hierarchies produce highly innovative sectors in the domestic market, the exclusively domestic orientation of the "hierarchical industry leaders" can entail large missed opportunities for other members of the ecosystem, who are unable to fully exploit their potential in global markets.

Dr. Hagiu will argue that Japan has to adopt several key measures in order to address these inefficiencies and capitalize on its innovation: strengthening antitrust and intellectual property rights enforcement; improving the legal infrastructure (e.g. producing more business law attorneys); lowering barriers to entry for foreign investment and facilitating the development of the venture capital sector.

Andrei Hagiu is an Assistant Professor in the Strategy group at Harvard Business School. His research focuses on multi-sided markets, which feature platforms serving two or more distinct groups of customers, who value each other's participation. He is studying the business strategies used by such platforms and the structure of the industries in which they operate: payment systems, advertising supported media, personal computers, videogames, mobile devices, shopping malls, etc. Hagiu is using the insights derived from this research to advise a wide range of companies in all of these industries.

In addition, he is also involved in competition and industrial policy research and advisory projects, in Japan, China and in the United States. He graduated from the Ecole Polytechnique and the Ecole Nationale de la Statistique et Adminstration Economique in France with an MS in economics and statistics, before obtaining a PhD in economics from Princeton University in 2004. Prior to joining HBS, he spent 18 months in Tokyo as a fellow at the Research Institute of Economy Trade and Industry, an economic policy think-tank affiliated with the Japanese Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry.

This event is presented in conjunction with the Japan Society of Northern California.

Download pdf
Download pdf

Philippines Conference Room

Andrei Hagiu Assistant Professor, Strategy Unit Speaker Harvard Business School
Seminars
Entrepreneurship in Japan: New Patterns After Post-Bubble Reforms
Stanford Project on Japanese Entrepreneurship (STAJE)

The Fortress and the Cloud: Women, technology and entrepreneurship in Japan

-

About the seminar

Facebook, YouTube and Second Life are well known in the US, but what about MIXI, 2-Channel or Nico Nico Douga? The digital domain is transforming life and business in Japan: traditional business "fortresses" are being challenged and new models are developing from within the "cloud" of the digital world.

These technologies and the "digital life-style" provide a foundation for businesses and disruptive business models arising from new areas within the socio-economic infrastructure of Japan. This, combined with increasing pressure on the shrinking labor market, creates an opportunity for significant change in the entrepreneurial environment in Japan, including the rise of women entrepreneurs. This seminar explores the ongoing transformation of social and institutional logic in Japan at the edge of the new digital frontier.

About the speaker

Charla Griffy-Brown is Associate Professor of Information Systems and Technology Management and holds the Denny Endowed Chair at Pepperdine University's Graziadio School of Business and Management. Dr. Griffy-Brown's primary areas of research are information systems security and techno-economic development in the Asia-Pacific. She has written extensively on technology and business development in Japan and recently co-authored a book of global case studies entitled Women, Technology and Entrepreneurship. She is part of a global research team analyzing the transformation of institutional systems and techno-economic development with the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis and Tokyo Institute of Technology.

Download pdf

Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room

Charla Griffy-Brown Associate Professor and Discipline Lead of Information Systems Speaker Pepperdine University
Seminars
Entrepreneurship in Japan: New Patterns After Post-Bubble Reforms
Stanford Project on Japanese Entrepreneurship (STAJE)

David Victor in Newsweek: The new greens like it big

Authors
David G. Victor
News Type
Commentary
Date
Paragraphs
David G. Victor comments on the current flattening of investment in green technology due to market forces. What is emerging, he says, is a shift towards a green economy of scale that is based on government intervention such as regulation, mandates, and subsidies. Such mechanisms are more reliable in the long run because a large part of green's success will need to be based on larger scale industrial complexes such as off-shore wind parks and electrical grids capable of storing and delivering intermittent power.

Serious greenery is about efficiency--not only in the use of energy but also labor and capital.

(Excerpt) The winds of economic destruction are flattening not just retirement accounts but also naive visions for a green economy. Public support for costly new green mandates is weakening, and government budgets to fund them are bleeding red ink. Plummeting prices of oil and other fossil fuels have made it harder for green to compete in the marketplace. IPOs of firms working on "clean tech" green energy that have fueled fantasies of the coming energy revolution have crashed to a halt. In all the bad economic news, a new face of green is coming into focus. Whereas the old view of green tech was based on many small, decentralized sources of power and a green economy that harnessed the power of the marketplace, the new version will rely more heavily on regulation and subsidies. It will also embrace the wisdom, true in most of the energy business, that bigger is better for weathering economic storms.

All News button
1

From Transactional Markets to Relational Networks: Amplifying the Innovation Potential of High-Tech Regions

Paragraphs

This paper seeks to reintegrate business strategy analysis in a way that better reflects the way that global business has evolved. Over the past thirty years, a variety of promising efforts have been made to reconceive business strategy (as summarized in Figure 1). Each of these initiatives captures important elements of the evolving business landscape, and yet, in the end, they each seem to address only fragments of the challenges and opportunities confronted by business executives today.

business strategy Figure 1

Figure 1

Business strategy in the 1970s and early 1980s was dominated by the strategy-as-structure school, as exemplified by academics like Michael Porter in his classic work Competitive Advantage, and practitioners like Bruce Henderson, the founder and leader of Boston Consulting Group. This school held that strategic advantage was structural in nature; sustainable profits could be earned by occupying privileged positions on the business landscape that were protected by such structural factors as economies of scale or scope or geographic economics or regulatory barriers.

In the 1990s, this view of business strategy came under increasing attack, reflecting growing instabilities in markets around the world. If industry structures and markets were undergoing increasing change, structural advantages suddenly seemed less promising as a basis of sustainable profitability. Perhaps the most promising of these new perspectives was popularized by Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad in their well-known book, Competing for the Future. With its emphasis on core competencies as a source of strategic advantage, this book in return drew on the emerging resource-based view (RBV) of the firm that had begun to emerge in the academic literature at least since the late 1950s. As presented by Hamel and Prahalad, this perspective remained very enterprise-centric: strategic advantage lay in clearly identifying and strengthening core competencies within the firm.

All Publications button
1
Publication Type
Working Papers
Publication Date
Journal Publisher
The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
Authors
Subscribe to Business