In 2010, while working on a PhD in South Korea, Andray Abrahamian visited the other Korea, a country he had studied for years but never seen. He returned determined to find a way to work closely with North Koreans. Ten years and more than thirty visits later, Being in North Korea tells the story of his experiences helping set up and run Choson Exchange, a non-profit that teaches North Koreans about entrepreneurship and economic policy.

Southeast Asia is arguably the most diverse region in the world. Accordingly, rather than addressing the exact same question, the contributors to this volume have — as experts on Southeast Asia-China relations — explored the matters they see as most important and most deserving of exploration and exposure. After the editor’s introduction, the chapters proceed in pairs. Each pair and a closing chapter cover a distinctive theme in Southeast Asia’s interactions with China.

Effective as of July 1, 2018, South Korea set a new cap on employees’ weekly working hours, decreasing the maximum number from 68 to 52. In this study, we comprehensively analyze the effectiveness of the law’s implementation by observing changes in work time, health status, health care utilization, health behavior, monthly expenses, and satisfaction between pre- and post-implementation periods (2014–2017 vs. 2019). We find evidence of both intended and unintended consequences—and, in this last category, some are beneficial and some not.

COVID-19 presents humanity with not just a health crisis but also a governance crisis as leaders around the globe confront the challenges of stemming the spread of the virus. Various governments have responded in various ways to slow the transmission of the virus. Ideally, the leaders of a country should approach the crisis with a two-pronged attack. The first is to flatten the epidemic curve (epi curve), which is simply a graphical representation of the number of cases and date of onset of the illness, and the second is to raise or strengthen the capacity of the health system. 

The intention to pay for human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination among women of childbearing age in Vietnam, where cervical cancer remains a significant public health concern, has been mostly lacking. To examine this issue, we conducted a cross-sectional study of 807 pregnant women in an urban and a rural district (Dong Da and Ba Vi) of Hanoi, Vietnam. The vast percentage of our respondents expressed a firm intention to vaccinate, especially women in rural areas (over 90.0%).

Explore our series of multimedia interviews and Q&As with the contributors to this volume: 

The easy phases of China’s quest for wealth and power are over. After forty years, every one of a set of favorable conditions has diminished or vanished, and China’s future, neither inevitable nor immutable, will be shaped by the policy choices of party leaders facing at least eleven difficult challenges, including the novel coronavirus. 

The substantial social and economic burden attributable to smoking is well‐known, with heavy smokers at higher risk of chronic disease and premature mortality than light smokers and nonsmokers. In aging societies with high rates of male smoking such as in East Asia, smoking is a leading preventable risk factor for extending lives (including work‐lives) and healthy aging.

In the 2019 fourth quarter edition of the Milken Institute Review, Asia Health Policy Program director Karen Eggleston discusses the progress China has made since the 2009 reforms to its healthcare, which brought basic coverage to all and reduced patients' share of costs, and explains the many challenges that remain, including increasing the system's efficiency to ensure its sustainability and addressing the disparities in healthcare that echo the "yawning gap in living standards between China's rising middle class and its poorest citizens."

China’s national health reforms over the past two decades have brought the system closer to the modern, safe, reliable and accessible health system that is commensurate with China’s dramatic economic growth, improvement in living standards, and high hopes for the next generation.

In Live Long and Prosper?, a new eBook edited by David Bloom, AHPP director Karen Eggleston contributes the chapter "Understanding 'Value for Money' in Healthy Ageing," in which she advocates for and explains the concept of "net value of medical care," a metric that helps quantify the social value of spending on healthcare.

By May 1966, just seventeen years after its founding, the People’s Republic of China had become one of the most powerfully centralized states in modern history. But that summer everything changed. Mao Zedong called for students to attack intellectuals and officials who allegedly lacked commitment to revolutionary principles. Rebels responded by toppling local governments across the country, ushering in nearly two years of conflict that in places came close to civil war and resulted in nearly 1.6 million dead.

Korea’s migrants have diversified in recent decades. A special section of the journal Asian Survey gathers articles that address this development by examining issues of class as an analytical lens in addition to ethnicity and citizenship, and also by considering the contributions of migrants from both human and social capital perspectives. By doing so, the authors aim to provide a better understanding of the varied experiences, realities, and complexities of Korea’s increasingly diverse migrant groups.

Truth to Power, the first-ever history of the U.S. National Intelligence Council (NIC), is told through the reflections of its eight Chairs in the period from the end of the Cold War until 2017. Co-editors Robert Hutchings and Gregory Treverton add a substantial introduction placing the NIC in its historical context going all the way back to the Board of National Estimates in the 1940s, as well as a concluding chapter that highlights key themes and judgments.

Promotion of inward foreign direct investment (FDI) into Japan has been an important policy in the Abenomics growth strategy. This paper examines if we observe positive impacts of the policy in the data. We first estimate a gravity model of bilateral FDIs using data for 35 OECD countries as destination countries. In estimating the model, we handle zero values for FDI stock explicitly. The model includes (origin and destination) country-specific effects as well as destination-country specific time trends.

Ties between individuals and institutions in the United States and the People’s Republic of China have become broader, deeper, and stronger during the four decades since the establishment of formal diplomatic relations in 1979 and the relationship can no longer be described as fragile. However, it also cannot yet be considered a normal relationship, at least not from the perspective of American citizens, companies, and commentators on international affairs. The relationship between the two largest economies and military powers has many asymmetries.

This special issue of The Journal of the Economics of Ageing, edited by Anita Mukherjee and APARC's Asia Health Policy Program Director Karen Eggleston, focuses on a key challenge around the world: financing the many needs that come with longer lives, lower fertility, and older population age structures. 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.

With an estimated 84 million people suffering from diabetes in South Asia, the disease imposes substantial economic burdens on individuals, families, and society. Furthermore, since the disease burden increasingly occurs in the most productive midlife period, it adversely affects workforce productivity and macroeconomic development. Diabetes-related complications lead to markedly higher treatment costs, causing catastrophic medical spending for many households, thus underscoring the importance of preventing diabetes-related complications.

The year 2019 is the centennial of several anti-colonialist movements that emerged in Asia, including the March First Movement of Korea, the first nationwide political protest in Korea under Japanese colonial rule. Although the movement failed to achieve national sovereignty, it left important legacies for Korea and other parts of Asia under foreign dominance.

This paper examines how social isolation in a non-Anglophone context where English is not the main language of instruction for local students but is for international students, has unintended consequences for social capital formation among the latter. What factors influence international student network formation in such places where linguistic barriers are institutionalised and what are their consequences not only during college but beyond, in shaping students’ career plans?

The central part of this book is an English version of the memoir of Masahiko Aoki that was published in Japanese in 2008 (青木昌彦『私の履歴書 人生越境ゲーム』日本経済新聞出版社).

From October 22–23, 2018, the U.S.-Asia Security Initiative (USASI) at Stanford University, in conjunction with the Institute for China-U.S.