Call for papers: Conference on the economics of ageing
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The Asia Health Policy Program at Stanford’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, in collaboration with scholars from Stanford Health Policy's Center on Demography and Economics of Health and Aging, the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and the Next World Program, is soliciting papers for the third annual workshop on the economics of ageing titled Financing Longevity: The Economics of Pensions, Health Insurance, Long-term Care and Disability Insurance held at Stanford from April 24-25, 2017, and for a related special issue of the Journal of the Economics of Ageing.
The triumph of longevity can pose a challenge to the fiscal integrity of public and private pension systems and other social support programs disproportionately used by older adults. High-income countries offer lessons – frequently cautionary tales – for low- and middle-income countries about how to design social protection programs to be sustainable in the face of population ageing. Technological change and income inequality interact with population ageing to threaten the sustainability and perceived fairness of conventional financing for many social programs. Promoting longer working lives and savings for retirement are obvious policy priorities; but in many cases the fiscal challenges are even more acute for other social programs, such as insurance systems for medical care, long-term care, and disability. Reform of entitlement programs is also often politically difficult, further highlighting how important it is for developing countries putting in place comprehensive social security systems to take account of the macroeconomic implications of population ageing.
The objective of the workshop is to explore the economics of ageing from the perspective of sustainable financing for longer lives. The workshop will bring together researchers to present recent empirical and theoretical research on the economics of ageing with special (yet not exclusive) foci on the following topics:
- Public and private roles in savings and retirement security
- Living and working in an Age of Longevity: Lessons for Finance
- Defined benefit, defined contribution, and innovations in design of pension programs
- Intergenerational and equity implications of different financing mechanisms for pensions and social insurance
- The impact of population aging on health insurance financing
- Economic incentives of long-term care insurance and disability insurance systems
- Precautionary savings and social protection system generosity
- Elderly cognitive function and financial planning
- Evaluation of policies aimed at increasing health and productivity of older adults
- Population ageing and financing economic growth
- Tax policies’ implications for capital deepening and investment in human capital
- The relationship between population age structure and capital market returns
- Evidence on policies designed to address disparities – gender, ethnic/racial, inter-regional, urban/rural – in old-age support
- The political economy of reforming pension systems as well as health, long-term care and disability insurance programs
Submission for the workshop
Interested authors are invited to submit a 1-page abstract by Sept. 30, 2016, to Karen Eggleston at karene@stanford.edu. The authors of accepted abstracts will be notified by Oct. 15, 2016, and completed draft papers will be expected by April 1, 2017.
Economy-class travel and accommodation costs for one author of each accepted paper will be covered by the organizers.
Invited authors are expected to submit their paper to the Journal of the Economics of Ageing. A selection of these papers will (assuming successful completion of the review process) be published in a special issue.
Submission to the special issue
Authors (also those interested who are not attending the workshop) are invited to submit papers for the special issue in the Journal of the Economics of Ageing by Aug. 1, 2017. Submissions should be made online. Please select article type “SI Financing Longevity.”
About the Next World Program
The Next World Program is a joint initiative of Harvard University’s Program on the Global Demography of Aging, the WDA Forum, Stanford’s Asia Health Policy Program, and Fudan University’s Working Group on Comparative Ageing Societies. These institutions organize an annual workshop and a special issue in the Journal of the Economics of Ageing on an important economic theme related to ageing societies.
More information can be found in the PDF below.
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Policy Challenges from Demographic Change in China and India
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The world’s two most populous countries face numerous policy challenges from rapid demographic change. Drawing on social science expertise from China, India, and the United States, the contributors examine the social and economic challenges for policies across a range of domains, from China’s changed family planning policies and India’s efforts to address gender imbalance, to both countries’ policies regarding old-age support, human capital investment, poverty alleviation, and broader issues of governance.
Sections focus on:
- Policy Challenges and Economic Impact
- Fertility and Sex Imbalance
- Human Capital and Urbanization
- Population Aging
Desk or examination copies can be ordered from Stanford University Press.
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Xi'an summit explores China in transition
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More than fifty experts met in Xi’an, China, for an international academic conference on demographic change and social development last week. Several scholars from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) spoke at the conference, including Karen Eggleston, Marcus Feldman, Jean Oi and Scott Rozelle.
The conference marked the 120th anniversary of Xi’an Jiaotong University’s founding and more than three decades of collaboration with Stanford scholars. Researchers at Xi’an Jiaotong University’s Institute for Population and Development Studies collaborate on policy-relevant research and educational activities with Stanford faculty at FSI as well as the Morrison Institute and Woods Institute.
For more information on FSI’s work in the areas of global health and medicine, please visit this page and the Asia Health Policy Program website.
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Health economists press for chronic disease as top agenda item
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Nearly 100 health economists from across the United States signed a pledge urging U.S. presidential candidates to make chronic disease a policy priority. Karen Eggleston, a scholar of comparative healthcare systems and director of Stanford’s Asia Health Policy Program, is one of the signatories.
The pledge calls upon the candidates to reset the national healthcare agenda to better address chronic disease, which causes seven out of 10 deaths in America and affects the economy through lost productivity and disability.
Read the pledge below.
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Cloaks and Veils: Countervisualizing Cigarette Factories In and Outside of China
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In this article, I consider what a casual observer can see of a notorious product’s primary place of fabrication. Few products have been criticized in recent years more than cigarettes. Meanwhile, around the world, the factories manufacturing cigarettes rarely come under scrutiny. What have been the optics helping these key links in the cigarette supply chain to be overlooked? What has prompted such optics to be adopted and to what effect? I address these questions using a comparative approach and drawing upon new mapping techniques, fieldwork, and social theory. I argue that a corporate impulse to hide from public health measures, including those of tobacco control, is not the only force to be reckoned with here. Cigarette factory legibility has been coproduced by multiple processes inherent to many forms of manufacturing. Cigarette makers, moreover, do not always run from global tobacco control. Nor have they been avoiding all other manifestations of biopolitics. Rather, in various ways, cigarette makers have been embracing biopolitical logics, conditioning them, and even using them to manage factory legibility. Suggestive of maneuvers outlined by Butler (2009) and Povinelli (2011) such as “norms of recognizability” and “arts of disguise,” cigarette factory concealment foregrounds the role of infrastructural obfuscation in the making of what Berlant (2007) calls “slow death.” Special focus on manufacturing in China illustrates important variations in the public optics of cigarette factories. The terms cloak and veil connote these variations. Whereas tactics currently obscuring cigarette manufacturing facilities generally skew toward an aesthetic of the opaque cloak in much of the world, there are norms of recognizability and arts of disguise applied to many factories across China that are more akin to a diaphanous, playful veil. I conclude with a discussion of how this article’s focus on factory legibility gestures toward novel forms of intervention for advocates working at tackling tobacco today, offering them an alternative political imaginary in what is one of the world’s most important areas of public policy making.
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Anthropological Quarterly
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Shorenstein APARC announces its 2016-17 postdoctoral fellows
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The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), in pursuit of training the next generation of scholars on contemporary Asia, has selected three postdoctoral fellows for the 2016-17 academic year. The cohort includes two Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellows and one Developing Asia Health Policy Fellow; they carry a broad range of interests from hospital reform to the economic consequences of elite politics in Asia.
The fellows will begin their year of academic study and research at Stanford this fall.
Shorenstein APARC has for more than a decade sponsored numerous junior scholars who come to the university to work closely with Stanford faculty, develop their dissertations for publication, participate in workshops and seminars, and present their research to the broader community. In 2007, the Asia Health Policy Program began its fellowship program to specifically support scholars undertaking comparative research on Asia health and healthcare policy.
The 2016-17 fellows’ bios and their research plans are listed below:
Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellows
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Developing Asia Health Policy Postdoctoral Fellow
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Myanmar: New government, better health?
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Myanmar’s historic election last year brought an end to more than 50 years of military rule, ushering in the National League for Democracy party led by Aung San Suu Kyi. A new administration brings with it an opportunity to rehabilitate the country’s fragile health system, experts wrote in the Lancet.
In the editorial, Stanford health economist Karen Eggleston and co-authors Thant Sun Htoo, Ngoc Minh Pham and Phyu Phyu Thin Zaw call for innovative leadership in Myanmar’s public healthcare system, which is currently facing substantial challenges and inequalities. Creating policies that equitably allocate health resources should be a key goal of the administration that has set out to achieve universal health coverage by 2030. This would not only work to raise public health but also build much-needed trust between the population and government, they said.
Pham and Zaw are both former visiting fellows of the Asia Health Policy Program, who spent the 2014-15 academic year working on research activities at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. Last July, Zaw wrote an op-ed in The Diplomat highlighting a doctor-led campaign against the “militarization” of the Ministry of Health called the “Black Ribbon Movement.” The movement is comprised of doctors and healthcare staff who are protesting the appointment of military staff to top health administration positions.
The Lancet's focus on healthcare in Myanmar coincided with the global commemoration of Universal Health Coverage Day, an annual day that urges greater action toward ensuring equal access to essential health services worldwide: http://universalhealthcoverageday.org/.
The Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education also interviewed Zaw while at Stanford. In this video released on March 10, Zaw highlights the changes Myanmar has already undertaken to reform its healthcare sytem and the challenges the country still faces.
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Myanmar pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi attends a parliamentary meeting at the Lower House of Parliament in Naypyitaw, July 9, 2012.
Reuters/Soe Zeya Tun
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Disparities in health and health care in Myanmar
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Myanmar (Burma) is undergoing a complex political and economic transformation, from a long civil war and military regime to a peace process and democratisation. Since 2011, the Myanmar Ministry of Health has started to rehabilitate the fragile health system, setting the goal of achieving universal health coverage by 2030. To achieve this target, Myanmar will have to face substantial challenges; arguably one of the most important difficulties is how to allocate limited health-care resources equitably and effectively.
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The Lancet
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