FSI scholars approach their research on the environment from regulatory, economic and societal angles. The Center on Food Security and the Environment weighs the connection between climate change and agriculture; the impact of biofuel expansion on land and food supply; how to increase crop yields without expanding agricultural lands; and the trends in aquaculture. FSE’s research spans the globe – from the potential of smallholder irrigation to reduce hunger and improve development in sub-Saharan Africa to the devastation of drought on Iowa farms. David Lobell, a senior fellow at FSI and a recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, has looked at the impacts of increasing wheat and corn crops in Africa, South Asia, Mexico and the United States; and has studied the effects of extreme heat on the world’s staple crops.
Health, Medicine, and Longevity: Exploring Public and Private Roles
This event is part of the Asia Health Policy Program (AHPP) 2020-21 Colloquium series "Health, medicine, and longevity: Exploring public and private roles"
Over the last decade, India has rapidly expanded government health insurance programs that entitle low-income households to free hospital care. In a major policy shift away from direct public provision of healthcare, these programs contract private hospitals for service delivery. This constitutes a sizeable public subsidy delivered through private agents, but there is relatively little evidence on how private hospitals perform. Using a unique dataset on 6 million insurance claims and 15,000 patient surveys, this talk will present several key insights on the behavior of private hospitals within a large government insurance program. 1) Private hospitals manipulate coding to increase their revenues at the government's expense. 2) They also charge patients out-of-pocket for care that is supposed to be free under program rules. 3) When the government increases hospital reimbursement rates, patient charges decrease substantially. 4) However, hospitals capture approximately half the increased subsidy and this is driven by less competitive markets. The results demonstrate that hospital reimbursement rates are a key policy lever shaping hospital behavior with implications for program outcomes. Improving program performance requires a combination of stronger hospital monitoring and attention to reimbursement rates; focusing on one without the other may reduce the efficiency of public spending or worsen patient welfare. Lastly, market structure, a factor rarely taken into consideration in health policy in India, may play a role in the extent to which public subsidies benefit patients.
https://aparc.fsi.stanford.edu/asiahealthpolicy/news/postdoctoral-spotlight-radhika-jain
She completed her doctorate in the Department of Global Health at Harvard University in 2019. Her dissertation examined the extent to which government subsidies for health care under insurance are captured by private hospitals instead of being passed through to patients, and whether accountability measures can help patients claim their entitlements. Dr. Jain's research has been supported by grants from the Weiss Family Fund and the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (JPAL). She has worked on impact evaluations of health programs in India and on the implementation of HIV programs across several countries in sub-Saharan Africa. She also held a doctoral fellowship at the Center for Global Development.
At Shorenstein APARC, Radhika is starting new work on understanding the factors that contribute to poor female health outcomes and interventions to increase the effectiveness of public health insurance.
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Register: https://bit.ly/37218gJ
This event is open to Stanford undergraduate students only.
The Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) will be accepting applications from eligible juniors on who are interested in writing their senior thesis on a subject touching upon democracy, economic development, and rule of law (DDRL) from any university department. The application period opens on January 11, 2021 and runs through February 12, 2021. CDDRL faculty and current honors students will be present to discuss the program and answer any questions.
For more information on the Fisher Family CDDRL Honors Program, please click here.
**Please note all CDDRL events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone
Online, via Zoom: REGISTER
CDDRL
Encina Hall, C152
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
Stephen Stedman is a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), an affiliated faculty member at CISAC, and professor of political science (by courtesy) at Stanford University. He is director of CDDRL's Fisher Family Honors Program in Democracy, Development and Rule of Law, and will be faculty director of the Program on International Relations in the School of Humanities and Sciences effective Fall 2025.
In 2011-12 Professor Stedman served as the Director for the Global Commission on Elections, Democracy, and Security, a body of eminent persons tasked with developing recommendations on promoting and protecting the integrity of elections and international electoral assistance. The Commission is a joint project of the Kofi Annan Foundation and International IDEA, an intergovernmental organization that works on international democracy and electoral assistance.
In 2003-04 Professor Stedman was Research Director of the United Nations High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change and was a principal drafter of the Panel’s report, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility.
In 2005 he served as Assistant Secretary-General and Special Advisor to the Secretary- General of the United Nations, with responsibility for working with governments to adopt the Panel’s recommendations for strengthening collective security and for implementing changes within the United Nations Secretariat, including the creation of a Peacebuilding Support Office, a Counter Terrorism Task Force, and a Policy Committee to act as a cabinet to the Secretary-General.
His most recent book, with Bruce Jones and Carlos Pascual, is Power and Responsibility: Creating International Order in an Era of Transnational Threats (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 2009).
Encina Hall, C150
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305
Didi Kuo is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is a scholar of comparative politics with a focus on democratization, corruption and clientelism, political parties and institutions, and political reform. She is the author of The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t (Oxford University Press) and Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the rise of programmatic politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
She has been at Stanford since 2013 as the manager of the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective and is co-director of the Fisher Family Honors Program at CDDRL. She was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America and is a non-resident fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She received a PhD in political science from Harvard University, an MSc in Economic and Social History from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and a BA from Emory University.
This event is part of the Asia Health Policy Program (AHPP) 2020-21 Colloquium series "Health, medicine, and longevity: Exploring public and private roles"
A quarter century ago in a seminal paper, Hart, Shleifer and Vishny (NBER1996, QJE1997) developed a theory of the ‘Proper Scope of Government.’ In this webinar, Oliver Hart, 2016 Nobel Laureate, reflects on that framework and its place in economics, as well as the inspiration for his more recent work on norms and guiding principles, contracts as reference points, maximizing shareholder welfare, and exit versus voice. In discussion with Karen Eggleston, Hart answers questions posed by economists who have built upon that paper and offers insights on how the theory applies to understanding public and private roles in healthcare, education, and other publicly-financed services. With China, India, and many other emerging markets engaged in decades-long controversies about public and private roles in their health sectors, and international focus on public-private partnerships for COVID-19 response and harnessing innovation to address other global challenges, this is an opportune time to discuss how conceptually rigorous thinking can inform a sometimes divisive and ideological debate with vital implications for human welfare.
This keynote is part of the Stanford Asia Health Policy Program colloquium series entitled: Health, medicine, and longevity: Exploring public and private roles
Governmental agencies and non-state actors interact within health systems in complicated and sometimes controversial ways that are vital for health and well-being. These run the gamut from developing and distributing vaccines and therapeutics for COVID-19 and mitigating the social and economic impact of the pandemic, to achieving and sustaining universal health coverage, addressing the social determinants of health, mitigating disparities, and encouraging innovations for healthy longevity, to name but a few. From the conceptual foundations to the daily reality of practitioners, this colloquium series will explore the evidence and experience of the public-private nexus in health sectors across Asia, in comparative global perspective. With colloquia throughout the academic year, the series features a keynote on February 10, 2021 from Nobel Laureate Oliver Hart, “A quarter century of ‘The Proper Scope of Government’: Theory and Applications” (dating from the 1996 NBER working paper subsequently published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, QJE).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9JRhGpXC2Y&feature=emb_title
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High resolution satellite imagery and modern machine learning methods hold the potential to fill existing data gaps in where crops are grown around the world at a sub-field level. However, high resolution crop type maps have remained challenging to create in developing regions due to a lack of ground truth labels for model development. In this work, we explore the use of crowdsourced data, Sentinel-2 and DigitalGlobe imagery, and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for crop type mapping in India. Plantix, a free app that uses image recognition to help farmers diagnose crop diseases, logged 9 million geolocated photos from 2017–2019 in India, 2 million of which are in the states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana in India. Crop type labels based on farmer-submitted images were added by domain experts and deep CNNs. The resulting dataset of crop type at coordinates is high in volume, but also high in noise due to location inaccuracies, submissions from out-of-field, and labeling errors. We employed a number of steps to clean the dataset, which included training a CNN on very high resolution DigitalGlobe imagery to filter for points that are within a crop field. With this cleaned dataset, we extracted Sentinel time series at each point and trained another CNN to predict the crop type at each pixel. When evaluated on the highest quality subset of crowdsourced data, the CNN distinguishes rice, cotton, and “other” crops with 74% accuracy in a 3-way classification and outperforms a random forest trained on harmonic regression features. Furthermore, model performance remains stable when low quality points are introduced into the training set. Our results illustrate the potential of non-traditional, high-volume/high-noise datasets for crop type mapping, some improvements that neural networks can achieve over random forests, and the robustness of such methods against moderate levels of training set noise. Lastly, we caution that obstacles like the lack of good Sentinel-2 cloud mask, imperfect mobile device location accuracy, and preservation of privacy while improving data access will need to be addressed before crowdsourcing can widely and reliably be used to map crops in smallholder systems.
This event is part of the Asia Health Policy Program (AHPP) 2020-21 Colloquium series "Health, medicine, and longevity: Exploring public and private roles"
Co-sponsored by the Asia Health Policy Program and the Southeast Asia Program
Jakarta time: Friday, October 30, 2020, 7:30am - 9:00am
Apart from the 1998 Asian Financial Crisis (AFC), the current COVID-19 economic crisis is Indonesia’s most serious economic calamity in half a century with adverse impact. In March 2020, Indonesia’s poverty rate increased from 9.41% to 9.78% year on year, the equivalent of 1.28 million new people entering poverty. By the end of 2020, it is expected that poverty rates will increase above 10%, wiping out two years of Indonesia’s poverty alleviation achievements. Social protection is key for crisis recovery. Indonesia’s social protection system has continually become stronger since the AFC. Over the past two decades, Indonesia has significantly expanded its social protection programs and coverage buttressed by a robust social registry that covers the poorest 40% of the population. The COVID-19 crisis is pushing the system to its limits. Insufficient data on Indonesians vulnerable to falling into poverty (and above the poorest 40%), coupled with response programs with complicated delivery and eligibility mechanisms, has made it challenging to deliver response-focused social protection. Dr. Sumarto will discuss whether the current social protection system is strong enough to weather the storm, especially to protect those working in the informal sector and marginal groups. Today, Indonesian policymakers have the choice to keep on following the same path and continue investing on the same social protection system, or take a radical move to reform it and make it better equipped to face future challenges.
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* Please note all CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.
Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/VJgMJyNz3F4
About the Event: Join David Sanger, National Security Correspondent for the New York Times, Amy Zegart, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies, Monica M. Ruiz, Program Fellow for the Cyber Initiative and Special Projects at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Alex Stamos, Adjunct Professor at the Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies, Michael McFaul, Director at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Herb Lin, Senior Research Scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, for a panel discussion of The Perfect Weapon, an HBO documentary special based on the best-selling book by New York Times national security correspondent David E. Sanger, which is now available to stream on HBO Max. Directed by John Maggio, the film explores the rise of cyber conflict as a primary way in which nations now compete with and sabotage one another. Cheap, invisible and devastatingly effective, cyber weapons are the present and future of geopolitical conflict – a short-of-war pathway to exercising power. The Perfect Weapon draws on interviews with top military, intelligence and political officials for a comprehensive view of a world of new vulnerabilities, particularly as fear mounts over how cyberattacks and influence operations may affect the 2020 U.S. election, vulnerable power grids, America’s nuclear weapons arsenal, and the global networks that are the backbone of private enterprise. The film also explores how the U.S. government is struggling to defend itself from cyberattacks while simultaneously stockpiling and using the world's most powerful offensive cyber arsenal.
Watch the film trailer HERE.
About the Speakers:
Dr. Herb Lin is senior research scholar for cyber policy and security at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and Hank J. Holland Fellow in Cyber Policy and Security at the Hoover Institution, both at Stanford University. His research interests relate broadly to policy-related dimensions of cybersecurity and cyberspace, and he is particularly interested in the use of offensive operations in cyberspace as instruments of national policy and in the security dimensions of information warfare and influence operations on national security. In addition to his positions at Stanford University, he is Chief Scientist, Emeritus for the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academies, where he served from 1990 through 2014 as study director of major projects on public policy and information technology, and Adjunct Senior Research Scholar and Senior Fellow in Cybersecurity (not in residence) at the Saltzman Institute for War and Peace Studies in the School for International and Public Affairs at Columbia University; and a member of the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. In 2016, he served on President Obama’s Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity. Prior to his NRC service, he was a professional staff member and staff scientist for the House Armed Services Committee (1986-1990), where his portfolio included defense policy and arms control issues. He received his doctorate in physics from MIT.
Dr. Michael McFaul is Director at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies in the Department of Political Science, and the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1995.
Dr. McFaul also is as an International Affairs Analyst for NBC News and a columnist for The Washington Post. He served for five years in the Obama administration, first as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Russian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council at the White House (2009-2012), and then as U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation (2012-2014). Continue Reading >>>
Monica M. Ruiz is the Program Fellow for the Cyber Initiative and Special Projects at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. In her work on the Cyber Initiative, she supports efforts to build a more robust cybersecurity field and improve policy-making. She also manages the foundation’s portfolio of Special Projects grants, part of a pool of flexible funds that allow the foundation to respond to unanticipated opportunities, explore potential initiatives, collaborate with other funders and facilitate cross-pollinating work across the foundation’s programs.
Prior to joining the foundation, Monica was the first recipient of the Boren Fellowship to travel to Estonia, where her research focused on cybersecurity issues and she studied the Russian language. Earlier in her career, she worked at U.S. Southern Command in the J9 Partnering Directorate, where she served as the military education coordinator between the Command and partners in the region.
Born in Ecuador and raised in Miami, she holds a bachelor’s degree from Florida International University and a master’s degree from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.
David E. Sanger is a national security correspondent and senior writer for the New York Times, a contributor to CNN and an adjunct lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government. In a 38-year reporting career for The Times, he has been on three teams that have won Pulitzer Prizes, most recently in 2017 for international reporting. His latest book, “The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage and Fear in the Cyber Age,’’ published in 2018, examined the emergence of cyberconflict as the primary way large and small states are competing and undercutting each other, changing the nature of global power. An HBO documentary based on the book will air in the Fall of 2020.
He is also the author of two Times best sellers on foreign policy and national security: “The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power,” published in 2009, and “Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power,” published in 2012. For The Times, Mr. Sanger has served as Tokyo bureau chief, Washington economic correspondent, White House correspondent during the Clinton and Bush administrations, and chief Washington correspondent. He co-teaches “Central Challenges in American National Security, Strategy and the Press” at Harvard.
Alex Stamos is a cybersecurity expert, business leader and entrepreneur working to improve the security and safety of the Internet through his teaching and research at Stanford University. Stamos is an Adjunct Professor at Stanford’s Freeman-Spogli Institute and a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution.
Prior to joining Stanford, Alex served as the Chief Security Officer of Facebook. In this role, Stamos led a team of engineers, researchers, investigators and analysts charged with understanding and mitigating information security risks to the company and safety risks to the 2.5 billion people on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. During his time at Facebook, he led the company’s investigation into manipulation of the 2016 US election and helped pioneer several successful protections against these new classes of abuse. As a senior executive, Alex represented Facebook and Silicon Valley to regulators, lawmakers and civil society on six continents, and has served as a bridge between the interests of the Internet policy community and the complicated reality of platforms operating at billion-user scale. In April 2017, he co-authored “Information Operations and Facebook”, a highly cited examination of the influence campaign against the US election, which still stands as the most thorough description of the issue by a major technology company. Continue Reading >>>
Dr. Amy Zegart is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies (FSI), professor of political science (by courtesy) at Stanford University, and a contributing editor to The Atlantic. She is also the Davies Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, where she directs the Robert and Marion Oster National Security Affairs Fellows program. From 2013 to 2018, she served as co-director of the Freeman Spogli Institute’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and founder and co-director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Program. She previously served as the chief academic officer of the Hoover Institution.
Her areas of expertise include cybersecurity, US intelligence and foreign policy, drone warfare, and political risk. An award-winning author, she has written four books. These include Bytes, Bombs, and Spies: The Strategic Dimensions of Offensive Cyber Operations (2019) coeditor with Herb Lin; Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity (2018) with Condoleezza Rice; Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and Origins of 9/11 (2007), which won the National Academy of Public Administration’s Brownlow Book Award; Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC (1999); and Eyes on Spies: Congress and the US Intelligence Community (Hoover Institution Press, 2011). She has also published in leading academic journals, including International Security, the Journal of Strategic Studies, and Political Science Quarterly. Continue Reading >>>
Virtual Seminar
Soojong Kim is a postdoctoral fellow, jointly affiliated with the Program on Democracy and the Internet (PDI) and the Digital Civil Society Lab (DCSL). He received his PhD at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. His research centers around social media, misinformation, and computational social science. As a former computer scientist and engineer, he is also interested in applying and developing innovative research methods, including web-based experiments, computational modeling, network analysis, and natural language processing.
He is recently focusing on three research projects. (1) Real-time Misinformation Monitoring: Evaluating the impacts of real-world misinformation messages in real-time and reducing their adverse socio-psychological consequences. (2) Virtual Social Media: Discovering and examining factors that influence behavior and perception of social media users based on interactive multi-agent network experiments. (3) Map of Misinformation: Investigating the structure of disinformation messages and the landscape of the fake news ecosystem and designing effective misinformation suppression/prevention strategies.
Dr. Kim worked at Samsung Electronics as a computer scientist for several years after earning his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Seoul National University, South Korea. He also holds his Master's degree in sociology. He is a recipient of the ICA Best Paper Award, Wharton Russell Ackoff Fellowship, Waterhouse Family Institute Research Grant Award, Annenberg Doctoral Research Fellowship, and MisinfoCon Research Grant.
Find more information on Dr. Kim’s research and news at his personal site http://www.soojong.kim/
This event is part of the Asia Health Policy Program (AHPP) 2020-21 Colloquium series "Health, medicine, and longevity: Exploring public and private roles"
Hong Kong time: Friday, October 16, 2020, 8:00am - 9:15am
Gabriel Leung, one of Asia’s leading epidemiologists and Dean of Medicine at the University of Hong Kong, provides an update on the global pandemic and policy responses in Asia. Leung’s presentation draws on his deep experience in research and policy, including research that defined the epidemiology of three novel viral epidemics, namely SARS in 2003, influenza A(H7N9) in 2013 and most recently COVID-19. Leung also served as Hong Kong's first Under Secretary for Food and Health (2008-11) and fifth Director of the Chief Executive's Office (2011-2).
Leung is one of Asia's leading epidemiologists and global health exponents, having authored more than 500 scholarly papers with an h-index of 66 (Scopus). His research defined the epidemiology of three novel viral epidemics, namely SARS in 2003, influenza A(H7N9) in 2013 and most recently COVID-19. He led Hong Kong government's efforts against pandemic A(H1N1) in 2009. He was founding co-director of HKU's World Health Organisation (WHO) Collaborating Centre for Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Control (2014-8) and currently directs the Laboratory of Data Discovery for Health at the Hong Kong Science and Technology Park (2020-).
Leung regularly advises national and international agencies including the World Health Organisation, World Bank, Asian Development Bank, Boao Forum for Asia, Institut Pasteur, Japan Center for International Exchange and China Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He is an Adjunct Professor of Peking Union Medical College Hospital and Adjunct Professorial Researcher of the China National Health Development Research Center.
He edited the Journal of Public Health (2007-14), was inaugural co-editor of Epidemics, associate editor of Health Policy and is founding deputy editor-in-chief of China CDC Weekly. He currently serves on the editorial boards of seven journals, including the British Medical Journal.
He is an elected member of the US National Academy of Medicine.
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This event is part of Shorenstein APARC’s fall webinar series "Shifting Geopolitics and U.S.-Asia Relations"
Chair/discussant: Donald K. Emmerson, director, Southeast Asia Program, Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford University
Topic: Analysts of Southeast Asia, struggling to find commonalities that its eleven diverse countries share, have long distinguished the region’s mainland from its maritime portions. Aspects of the contrast include the mainland’s greater proximity to China. A controversial hypothesis follows: that subcontinental Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, and possibly Thailand (but arguably not Vietnam) are more likely to become peninsular parts of a sphere of influence overseen by China than are the region’s more insular or archipelagic countries—Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Timor-Leste. In support of the mainland versus maritime distinction, historical, cultural, and socioeconomic differences can also be cited. But how much do they really matter? Does the mainland-maritime contrast, for example, enhance or impede the ability of Southeast Asian countries to retain national independence and fashion a common front in defense of the autonomy of their region? Or is location irrelevant? And if other factors matter more, which ones, how, and why? The webinar will offer and explore answers to these and related questions.
Dr. Murphy's research interests include international relations and comparative politics in Southeast Asia, U.S. foreign policy toward Asia, and governance of non-traditional security issues. She is co-author (with Amy Freedman) of Non-Traditional Security Issues in Southeast Asia: the Transnational Dimension, (2018) and co-editor (with Bridget Welsh) of Legacies of Engagement in Southeast Asia (2008). Dr. Murphy’s articles have appeared in journals such as Asian Security, Contemporary Southeast Asia, Orbis, Asia Policy, World Politics Review and PS: Political Science & Politics. Dr. Murphy is a founding partner of the New York Southeast Asia Network and is currently completing a book on the impact of democracy on Indonesian foreign policy with the generous support of the Smith Richardson Foundation.
