Stanford University

Public Health

Siyan Yi

0
2011-12 Developing Asia Health Policy Fellow
YiSiyan_Profile.jpg MD, PhD

Dr. Siyan Yi joined the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) as a 2011-12 Developing Asia Health Policy Postdoctoral Fellow from the National Center of Global Health and Medicine and the University of Tokyo, Japan, where he jointly served as a research fellow and lecturer. He also served as an adjunct faculty member at Cambodia’s School of Public Health, the National Institute of Public Health, and the School of International Studies at the Royal University of Phnom Penh. He is currently an Associate Professor and UHS-SPH Integrated Research Programme Leader at NUS Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health (profile page here).

Yi’s research has centered largely on epidemiological methods. This has included, for example, work on surveys in Cambodia on adolescent risky sexual behaviors, substance abuse, and depression; a health promotion project in primary schools; sexual behaviors among people living with HIV/AIDS; and HIV risky behaviors among tuberculosis patients. Currently, he is involved in hospital- and community-based research projects in several developing countries as well as in Japan. He has published several papers in these research areas in international journals. His selected publications include:

  • Siyan Yi, Akiko Nanri, Kalpana Poudel, Daisuke Nonaka, Hori Ai, Tetsuya Mizoue. “Association between serum ferritin and depressive symptoms in Japanese municipal employees.” Psychiatry Research, 2011. 189: 368-372.
  • Siyan Yi, Daisuke Nonaka, Marino Nomoto, Jun Kobayashi, and Tetsuya Mizoue. “Predictors of the uptake of A (H1N1) influenza vaccine: Findings from a population-based longitudinal study in Tokyo.” PLoS One, 2011. 6: e18893.
  • Siyan Yi, Krishna C. Poudel, Junko Yasuoka, Paula H. Palmer, Songky Yi, and Masamine Jimba. “Risk vs. protective factors for substance use among adolescent students in Cambodia.” Journal of Substance Use, 2011. 16:14-26.
  • Siyan Yi, Krishna C. Poudel, Junko Yasuoka, Paula H. Palmer, Songky Yi, and Masamine Jimba. “Role of risk and protective factors for risky sexual behaviors among high school students in Cambodia.” BMC Public Health, 2010. 10: 477.
  • Siyan Yi, Krishna C. Poudel, Junko Yasuoka, Masao Ichikawa, Vutha Tan, and Masamine Jimba. “Influencing factors for seeking HIV voluntary counseling and testing among tuberculosis patients in Cambodia.” AIDS Care, 2009. 21: 529-534.

Yi holds an MHSc (2007) and a PhD (2010) in international health sciences from the School of International Health at the University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Medicine. He also earned an MD in general medicine from the University of Health Sciences, Cambodia (2001). Yi has won research awards, including: the Young Investigator Award from the Asia Pacific Academic Consortium for Public Health (2008), the Montreux Prize from the Swiss Association for Adolescent Health and the International Association for Adolescent Health (2009), and the Scientific Research Award from the University of Tokyo (2009).

Hide publication sections
Off
Date Label

Kohrman's ground-breaking study of cigarette warning labels

News Type
News
Date
Paragraphs
What influence might graphic warning labels have on cigarette sales? Matthew Kohrman is studying that question with experimental methods in Southwest China. Kohrman’s research is generating much-needed data in support of the expansion of China’s warning label system. Among the countries increasingly adopting graphic labels, the United States will require visual warnings on all cigarette packages by next fall.

Stanford Cancer Center News: Smoking cessation in a land of two trillion cigarettes
Hero Image
PikkelRyanNEWSFEED
Packages of cigarettes for sale in China. | Ryan Pikkel
All News button
1

Give new smoking ban time, suggests China tobacco health expert Matthew Kohrman

News Type
News
Date
Paragraphs
Tobacco is the single greatest cause of preventable death in the world today, including in China where cigarette smoking is a popular pastime. "The [tobacco] industry in China is run by the Tobacco Monopoly Administration, a central government administrative body created in the 1980s, also known as China Tobacco Corp.," said Matthew Kohrman in a February 2011 interview with NPR's Morning Edition. China nonetheless issued a nationwide indoor smoking ban on May 1. Speaking with Al Jazeera English on the first day of the ban, Kohrman predicted that Chinese citizens will increasingly comply with the ban even if in fits and starts initially. "It all has to do with implementation," he suggested. "It all has to do with changing the culture of smoking and people’s thinking about it—that takes time."



Hero Image
NoSmokingNEWSFEED2
A no-smoking sign at an airport in China | Oriol Salvador
All News button
1

The Performance and Driving Force of Government Health Expenditure in China: Evidence from Provincial Panel Data, 1991-2007

-

The new health reform started in 2009 has shown the determination of the Chinese government, especially the central government, to increase its responsibility in the health sector. The most obvious manifestation of this commitment would be to increase government health expenditure (GHE). But there is still a hot debate about whether the government should allocate more public finds to health or just deepen the marketization of the health sector. Moreover, commitments at the central and local levels are not the same: local government responsibility for GHE is high, and commitments by the central government to increase GHE have not translated into increases in local government GHE as much as proposed in the national health reform.

Our research seeks to answer two questions: What was the actual pattern of GHE? And why did China’s local governments respond as they did? We first discuss the necessity of public financing for health care, and then analyze how intergovernmental economic competition affects local governments’ behavior under “Chinese-style decentralization” (known as fiscal decentralization with political centralization). Empirically, we apply a dynamic panel data model to provincial panel data from 1991 to 2007 to identify the effect of GHE on health performance in each province over time, using infant mortality and some morbidity metrics as health performance variables. We also examine differences across regions, as well as before and after the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic of 2003.

Our analysis provides evidence that Chinese-style decentralization negatively impacted GHE. The main findings are as follows:

  1. Increasing GHE did improve health performance, and this improvement was mainly driven by the GHE through the health department directly, not through spending by other governmental departments that also impact health. However, pursuit of economic performance lowered local governments’ GHE, mainly by decreasing GHE through local health departments.
  2. Compared with in the eastern and western regions, this health improvement was not significant in China’s middle regions, where the intergovernmental economic competition leads to much less GHE through health departments.
  3. The outburst of SARS in 2003 further increased the positive effect from GHE through local health departments, while the effect from GHE through other departments was not equally significant.

All these results suggest that adjusting the structure of public health financing, reforming the fiscal system, and improving the performance evaluation system for local governments are critical for the success of China’s on-going health reform.

Philippines Conference Room

Qiulin Chen

Shorenstein APARC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, Room C335
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 736-0771 (650) 723-6530
0
2011 Shorenstein-Spolgi Fellow in Comparative Health Policy
Qiulin_Chen3x4.jpg MA, PhD

Qiulin Chen is a postdoctoral fellow of Shorenstein APARC and a member of the center's Asia Health Policy Program. His main interest of research is health economics and public finance, focusing on policy and outcome comparison of health care systems and Chinese health reform. His dissertation focused on performance comparison between public (or governmental) and private health care financing, between local and central government responsibility on health care, between contracted and integrated health care system. In particular, his dissertation examined under Chinese-style decentralization, known as fiscal decentralization with political centralization, how economic competition affect local government's behaviour on health investment, and why public contracted system obstructs health performance and provides one channel of such effects in terms of preventive care and public health. He is currently involved in a comparative research project on demographic change in East Asia based on the National Transfer Accounts data and analysis.

Chen's recent publication is "The changing pattern of China's public services" (with Ling Li and Yu Jiang) in Population Aging and the Generational Economy: A Global Perspective (Ronald Lee and Andrew Mason, editors), forthcoming 2011. Before studying in Stanford, he has published more than 10 papers in academic journals in Chinese, such as Jing Ji Yan Jiu (Economic Research) and Zhong Guo Wei Sheng Jing Ji (Chinese Health Economics), and 5 book chapters. He has participated in about 20 research projects, such as A Design of Framework for Healthcare Reform in China which is commissioned by the State Council Working Party on Health Reform, Strategy Planning Study of "Healthy China 2020" which is commissioned by the Minister of Health, and Health Challenge in the Aging Society and It's Policy Implication funded by Chinese National Natural Science Foundation.

Chen earned his Ph.D. in Economics from Peking University in 2010, and earned a B.A. in Business Administration from Nanjing University in 2001. From 2004 through 2008, he was Executive Assistant of the Director of the China Centre for Economic Research at Peking University (CCER). He is also a postdoctoral fellow of National School of Development at Peking University (Its predecessor is CCER).

CV
Qiulin Chen 2011 Shorenstein-Spogli Fellow in Comparative Health Policy Speaker Stanford University
Seminars

Qiulin Chen

Shorenstein APARC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, Room C335
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 736-0771 (650) 723-6530
0
2011 Shorenstein-Spolgi Fellow in Comparative Health Policy
Qiulin_Chen3x4.jpg MA, PhD

Qiulin Chen is a postdoctoral fellow of Shorenstein APARC and a member of the center's Asia Health Policy Program. His main interest of research is health economics and public finance, focusing on policy and outcome comparison of health care systems and Chinese health reform. His dissertation focused on performance comparison between public (or governmental) and private health care financing, between local and central government responsibility on health care, between contracted and integrated health care system. In particular, his dissertation examined under Chinese-style decentralization, known as fiscal decentralization with political centralization, how economic competition affect local government's behaviour on health investment, and why public contracted system obstructs health performance and provides one channel of such effects in terms of preventive care and public health. He is currently involved in a comparative research project on demographic change in East Asia based on the National Transfer Accounts data and analysis.

Chen's recent publication is "The changing pattern of China's public services" (with Ling Li and Yu Jiang) in Population Aging and the Generational Economy: A Global Perspective (Ronald Lee and Andrew Mason, editors), forthcoming 2011. Before studying in Stanford, he has published more than 10 papers in academic journals in Chinese, such as Jing Ji Yan Jiu (Economic Research) and Zhong Guo Wei Sheng Jing Ji (Chinese Health Economics), and 5 book chapters. He has participated in about 20 research projects, such as A Design of Framework for Healthcare Reform in China which is commissioned by the State Council Working Party on Health Reform, Strategy Planning Study of "Healthy China 2020" which is commissioned by the Minister of Health, and Health Challenge in the Aging Society and It's Policy Implication funded by Chinese National Natural Science Foundation.

Chen earned his Ph.D. in Economics from Peking University in 2010, and earned a B.A. in Business Administration from Nanjing University in 2001. From 2004 through 2008, he was Executive Assistant of the Director of the China Centre for Economic Research at Peking University (CCER). He is also a postdoctoral fellow of National School of Development at Peking University (Its predecessor is CCER).

CV

Health-damaging and Climate-changing Air Pollution in Asia

-

Kirk R. Smith will speak about his current research on health-damaging and climate-changing air pollution from household energy use in developing Asia, including field measurement and health-effects studies in India, China, and Nepal, compared to other countries such as Mexico and Guatemala. The work encompasses developing and deploying small, smart, and cheap microchip-based monitors as well as tools for international policy assessments.

Dr. Smith is Professor of Global Environmental Health and Director of the Global Health and Environment Program at the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley.  Previously, he was founder and head of the Energy Program of the East-West Center in Honolulu, where he still holds appointment as Adjunct Senior Fellow in Environment and Health after moving to Berkeley in 1995. He serves on a number of national and international scientific advisory committees including the Global Energy Assessment, National Research Council's Board on Atmospheric Science and Climate, the Executive Committee for WHO Air Quality Guidelines, and the International Comparative Risk Assessment. He participated along with many other scientists in the IPCC's 3rd and 4th assessments and thus shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He holds visiting professorships in India and China and bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees from UC Berkeley. In 1997, he was elected a member of the US National Academy of Sciences. In 2009, he received the Heinz Prize in Environment.

Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room

Kirk R. Smith Professor of Global Environmental Health and Director of the Global Health and Environment Program at the School of Public Health Speaker University of California, Berkeley
Seminars
Subscribe to Public Health