Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his Liberal Democratic Party won by a landslide in the national election for the upper house of parliament on July 10. Writing for Toyo Keizai, Shorenstein APARC Associate Director for Research Daniel Sneider said American policymakers hope the Prime Minister will use the fresh mandate to kick-start stalled economic reforms and to move ahead on implementation of Japan’s new security legislation. Read the article here.

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.

On the heels of the IISS Shangri-La Dialogue, scholars, members of think tanks and former U.S. and Chinese government officials came to Beijing to discuss what many participants considered “the most important bilateral relationship” in the world: the relationship between the United States and China. As former U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte described during his opening remarks, the relationship, “if properly managed,” can result in an enormous boon for the world; but if mismanaged, can bring great harm to global stability and prosperity.

Stanford and Peking University jointly hosted a forum titled “A Changing Global and Political Order: Perspectives from China-United States Cooperation” on June 6-7 in Beijing. All attendees, who participated in their capacity as private individuals, acknowledged that a level of uncertainty and tension clouds the bilateral relationship, exemplified most clearly in the territorial disputes in the South China Sea. Having participated in the restoration of Sino-U.S. relations in 1972, Negroponte and former Chinese Ambassador Wu Jianmin remarked upon the geopolitical rationale that first motivated this rapprochement: to counter the Soviet Union. They noted that the bilateral relationship has grown increasingly robust and multi-dimensional over time. For example, Wu cited that trade between the United States and China has increased exponentially, from a mere US$1 billion in 1978 to $550 billion in 2015. Investment, economic cooperation and competition have also grown. Despite disagreements on regional security matters, both countries have worked together on global challenges such as climate change, North Korean and Iranian nuclear issues, anti-piracy efforts and the Ebola outbreak.

However, with China’s rapid rise, both militarily and economically, and as the developing world has gained increasing clout on the world’s stage, many participants suggested that the current global order, originally envisaged in 1944 with the Bretton-Woods Agreement, needed an update. Many participants, especially on the Chinese side, stated that the “balance of power was shifting” with the G7/G8 yielding economic momentum to the G20. The American participants generally did not share Chinese views of a power transition, but conceded that reforms were necessary to the global order to take into account China’s meteoric rise.  Participants did not dispute the benefits that China has derived from the current international order and most agreed that some type of evolutionary change is needed to increase inclusivity. As one participant asked regarding China’s perception of the United States (and vice versa), “Are we foes, enemies or friends?” Despite such ambiguity, U.S.-China cooperation is essential to effecting any type of change.

Questions were rife and specificity was scant with respect to what the key changes were or the mechanisms by which those reforms should be effected, however. Which countries should partake in this decision-making body? Should other entities and institutions other than nation-states be included? What are the rules of participation and criteria for membership? How large should the governing body be? What key reforms need to be undertaken?

Both Negroponte and Wu disavowed the zero-sum mentality of the Cold War, which, Wu stated, continues to impact perceptions on both sides. They both highlighted the critical importance of frequent dialogue by the Chinese and American heads of state and by their militaries. Calling summit-level meetings between the two presidents “indispensable,” Negroponte emphasized that “[both] leaders have to understand [the] viewpoints and attitudes of each country” in order to formulate the right policies. Negroponte added, “[d]iplomacy at that level is probably more important than it has ever been.”

As this summary of the forum is posted, we note with sadness the untimely death of Ambassador Wu Jianmin on June 18, 2016, in a tragic car accident in Wuhan, China.

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Photo gallery from the conference

Fifty years have passed since the beginning of China’s Cultural Revolution, a mass political movement led by Mao Zedong that lasted a decade and provoked widespread violence and social upheaval. Stanford sociologist Andrew Walder, a noted expert on contemporary Chinese society, offered his commentary and analysis to various media outlets, cited below.

In the years just following Mao’s death in 1976, the Communist Party showed an “incredible openness” toward addressing the horrors caused by the Cultural Revolution, he told The Guardian. The Communist Party denounced the Cultural Revolution and some within the Party led efforts to document the chaos and bloodshed under Mao’s tenure, Walder recounted on CNN International.

In the 1980s, however, young Chinese activists began to shift their attention from the legacy of the Cultural Revolution to the lack of government reform in China. The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, despite being short-lived, disquieted the regime more than the Cultural Revolution did, he told The Guardian.

The Chinese government today, compared to the 1970s and early 80s, is much less inclined to discuss Mao’s historical record. Yet, when compared to other socialist regimes that experienced rebellion such as the Soviet Union, China has been much more open to confronting its dark historical past, Walder said in an interview with The Globe and Mail.

Walder is the author of China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed and Fractured Rebellion: The Beijing Red Guard Movement (Harvard University Press, 2015 and 2009, respectively). He leads a research project focused on political movements in authoritarian regimes and recently published a journal article on transitions from state socialism and its economic impact.