Teh-wei Hu is a Professor Emeritus of health economics at the University of California, Berkeley.  At Berkeley, he served as associate dean (1999-2002) and department chair (1990-1993) in the School of Public Health.  He received his PhD in Economics from the University of Wisconsin.  

During the past 40 years, Professor Hu has been teaching and conducting research in health economics, particularly in healthcare financing and the economics of tobacco control.  Hu was a Fulbright scholar in China. He has served as consultant or advisor to the World Bank, the World Health Organization, the National Institutes of Health, the Institute of Medicine, the Rand Corporation, the Ministry of Health in the People's Republic of China, Department of Health and Welfare in Hong Kong, Department of Health in the Republic of China (Taiwan), and many private research institutions and foundations. 

Professor Hu will speak to us immediately after an April trip to China, sharing his research and perspectives on the economics of tobacco control and the debate about healthcare system reforms in China (including a possible link between the two through financing expansions in coverage through increased tobacco taxation).

Rapid population aging in many Asian countries poses an increased burden of care for elderly people with disabilities. Traditionally, care for the disabled elderly was provided by family members co-residing or living nearby. However, declining fertility rates, eroding social norms, and growing rates of labor force participation among females have changed the overall picture of informal care. 

One important policy question is whether informal caregiving affects caregivers' labor force participation. This question is particularly relevant for rapidly developing economies including newly industrialized countries, because a shrinking working-age population is another major concern with population aging. Providing different answers to this question leads to different policy implications for long-term care policy and labor market policy. 

Most of the existing literature on this issue comes from the United States and Europe. Using data from the first wave of the "Korean Longitudinal Study of Aging", Do's research not only provides results from a less-studied Asian society, but also takes into account different patterns of living arrangements and labor force participation. His talk will deal with the methodological issue of endogeneity between informal caregiving and labor force participation, and explore gender and age group differences.

Young Kyung Do is currently completing his PhD in health policy and administration at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Public Health. He has also earned both an MD and a master of public health degrees from Seoul National University (in 1997 and 2003, respectively). Young earned board certification in preventive medicine from the Korean Medical Association in 2004.

Migration and health are two areas that have each received significant amounts of attention in sociology. However, only recently have researchers begun to examine the links between these two population processes. There is growing yet incomplete evidence that migration and the health are intertwined in complex ways. Health itself can impact the decision to move, and migration may affect the health of those who move, those who stay, and those who host migrants. Using high quality longitudinal data from Indonesia, Lu's research makes a serious attempt to tackle important questions about the association between migration and health in the Indonesian context. In particular, she examines both how health may affect migration decisions, and how changing socioeconomic conditions associated with migration may have implications for the health of various populations involved, including not only migrants but also people left behind in sending communities. Lu will also discuss research underway on migration and health in China, including a new national survey with data to study that topic in the Chinese context.

Yao Lu is a Ph.D. candidate of Sociology, M.S. candidate of Public Health, and student affiliate at the California Center for Population Research at UCLA. She has a BS from Fudan University in China. Her research focuses on studying the causes and consequences of internal migration in developing countries, and modeling socioeconomic and behavioral factors as determinants of health. Her papers include studies based on data from China, Indonesia, and South Africa. She has a paper forthcoming in the American Sociological Review, and has received dissertation fellowships from the AAUW foundation and the Asia Institute at UCLA. She is currently completing her dissertation on the relationship between labor migration and health in Indonesia, while working on a national survey project on internal migration and health in China.