The ability of governments to raise revenue to finance spending varies greatly across the industrialized democracies. Despite the prediction of the globalization thesis, variation in budget deficits and public debt has actually increased. While a developed literature has attempted to explain fiscal performance, there has been little attention to the role of that the welfare state might have.  Meanwhile, the welfare state literature has focused on welfare spending with less attention to how such spending is financed.  This presentation shows that the two are linked.  Governments can use taxes not only as a source of revenue but also as a means to achieve redistributive goals directly by targeting tax relief to specific groups.  Using quantitative data and a case study of Japan and Sweden, this study shows how governments combine welfare and tax policies, i.e., the “tax-welfare mix,” shapes their long-term extractive capacity.

Gene Park is an assistant professor in the department of political science at Loyola Marymount University (LMU).  Prior to arriving at LMU, he taught at Baruch College, City University of New York. Previously, Dr. Park was Shorenstein Fellow at Stanford University’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and a visiting scholar at the Japanese Ministry of Finance’s Policy Research Institute.  He specializes in comparative political economy and has an area interest in Japan.  His research focuses on the politics of public spending and taxation.  He is the author of Spending without Taxation: FILP and the Politics of Public Finance in Japan (Stanford University Press, 2011). He is currently working on a comparative study of fiscal consolidation and a comparative study of state extractive capacity.

The talk , based on a recent paper, will describe and examine the social understanding of selling sex for a visa among migrant Filipina hostesses in Tokyo. The paper examines the different constitutions of love in Japan and the Philippines to understand the making of love in the marriages of Filipina hostesses and their Japanese customers. The paper will attempt to argue why the act of selling sex for a visa does not necessarily reduce marriage to prostitution while at the same time questioning the assumption that marriage is ever free of rational motivation.

Rhacel Salazar Parreñas is Professor and Chair of the Sociology Department at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include the sociology of gender and labor, the family, and globalization. Her latest book Illicit Flirtations: Labor, Migration and Sex Trafficking in Tokyo received the 2012 Distinguished Book Award in the Labor and Labor Movements Section of the American Sociological Association.

Much has been made of the Asian success story. The region is a key driver of the global economy, and the lives of millions of its people have been transformed in ways unimaginable decades ago.

It is ironic, however, that the factors that have driven Asia's rapid growth—technology, globalization, and market-oriented reforms—are the same factors driving inequality. Asia remains home to the world's largest concentration of poor. Millions of people do not have access even to basic services, and weak governance is a serious concern. 

Rising inequality is not the only challenge facing Asian countries. There is also the looming threat of environmental degradation. For decades the region has taken the approach of “grow now, clean up later,” wreaking havoc on the environment and putting lives and livelihoods at serious risk.

If Asia is to achieve sustainable growth, it must pursue both inclusive growth and green growth. These should not be separate processes, but rather simultaneous processes that focus on the quality of growth rather than quantity of growth.

Rajat M. Nag, managing director general of the Asian Development Bank, will speak on why and how Asia should boldly confront the twin challenges of inclusive and green growth so that its people, and the rest of the world, will continue to benefit from its successful growth story.  

About the Speaker

Rajat M. Nag is the managing director general of the Asian Development Bank (ADB). With broad experience across Asia, Mr. Nag plays a critical role in providing strategic and operational direction to ADB. He also oversees the risk management operations of ADB.

Mr. Nag’s work has given him wide-ranging insight into several issues and challenges relevant to Asia, including infrastructure financing, public-private partnerships, and regional economic integration. His particular interest is in working to enhance regional cooperation and integration in Asia, and to bridge the gap between the region’s thriving economies and the millions of poverty-stricken people being left behind. Read more.

Education has provided the critical foundation for Asia’s rapid economic growth. However, in an increasingly globalized and digital world, higher education faces an array of new challenges. While the current strengths and weaknesses of educational systems across Asia differ considerably, they share many of the same fundamental challenges and dilemmas.

The fourth annual Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue examined challenges and opportunities in reforming higher education in Asia. At its core, the challenge facing every country is how to cultivate relatively immobile assets—national populations—to capture increasingly mobile jobs with transforming skill requirements. This raises fundamental questions about skills needed for fast-paced change, domestic inequality, the role of government, and choices of resource allocations.

Scholars and top-level administrators from Stanford University and universities across Asia, as well as policymakers, journalists, and business professionals, met in Kyoto on September 6 and 7, 2012, to discuss questions that address vital themes related to Asia’s higher education systems. These included:

• Can higher education meet the challenges of economic transformations?
  As skill requirements change with the increasing use of IT tools that enable manufacturing and service tasks to be broken apart and moved around, how can higher education systems cope? How can education systems address the increasing need for global coordination across languages and cultures? How can countries deal with demographic challenges, with developed countries facing overcapacity and developing countries with younger populations facing an undercapacity of educational resources?

• How are higher education systems globalizing?
  What are the strategies for the globalization of higher education itself? How are universities positioning themselves to attract top talent from around the world, and what are their relative successes in achieving this? What are the considerations when building university campuses abroad? Conversely, what are the issues surrounding allowing foreign universities to build within one’s own country?

• How can higher education play a greater role in innovation?
  What is the interplay between private and public institutions and research funding across countries, and what are the opportunities and constraints facing each? What is the role of national champion research initiatives? For developed East Asian countries, a focus on producing engineers raised the economic base, but many are discovering that they are still not at the leading edge of innovation. What are ways to address this dilemma? For developing countries, the challenge is how to improve basic education from the level of training basic factory workers to creating knowledge workers. How might this be accomplished? Is there room for a liberal arts college model?

• What are the challenges and opportunities in reforming higher education?
  What are effective ways of overcoming organizational inertia, policy impediments, and political processes that hinder reform? What are the debates and issues surrounding ownership, governance, and financing of higher education?

The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) established the Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue in 2009 to facilitate conversation about current Asia-Pacific issues with far-reaching global implications. Scholars from Stanford University and various Asian countries start each session of the two-day event with stimulating, brief presentations, which are followed by engaging, off-the-record discussion. Each Dialogue closes with a public symposium and reception, and a final report is published on the Shorenstein APARC website.

Previous Dialogues have brought together a diverse range of experts and opinion leaders from Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, India, Australia, and the United States. Participants have explored issues such as the global environmental and economic impacts of energy usage in Asia and the United States; the question of building an East Asian regional organization; and addressing the dramatic demographic shift that is taking place in Asia.

The annual Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue is made possible through the generosity of the City of Kyoto, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, and Yumi and Yasunori Kaneko.